Flock Blog

Flock 1.2.5: Facebook and Twitter Fixes

Evan Hamilton — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:26:58 -0700

While we're still hard at work pushing Flock 2 from beta towards release, we are taking a moment to provide you with Flock 1.2.5.

Flock puts you at the center of the action, with all your tools and services orbiting around you. It's a lot of work to string all these things together, and occasionally things break. This has been the case with Twitter and Facebook in recent days, as they have both changed elements of their back-end (Facebook with a new design, Twitter with their feeds). You may have noticed issues posting your status to Facebook from the People Sidebar or getting recent friend updates from Twitter in the sidebar. These have been fixed in Flock 1.2.5, which is available now from http://www.flock.com. Auto-updates will go out next week.

Enjoy, and please continue to provide the great and timely feedback that allows us to keep Flock in tip top shape!

Evan Hamilton
Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: flock, browser, 1.2.5, twitter, facebook, newfacebook, bugs, fixes

Flock and the Thirty Day Challenge

Evan Hamilton — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:44:25 -0700

Like most companies, we keep a close eye on what is driving traffic to our website. The changes are fascinating to watch week to week...small blog posts end up sending solid chunks of traffic, large articles sometimes send surprisingly little, and occasionally very interesting items pop out at us.

About two months ago we started seeing major traffic from a new website: www.ThirtyDayChallenge2008.com. We took a look at the site and discovered two interesting things:

1) They're recommending that everyone taking The Challenge use Flock as their primary browser.

2) They have a really cool thing going.

The Thirty Day Challenge is a program in which you spend thirty days learning about internet marketing and at the end, you will have made your first buck on the web. It's a cool concept and is run in a great, no-strings-attached sort of way. These guys make their money in internet marketing, and this project is about them giving back. They've grown to be arguably the largest web-based learning program/community in just 4 years. And they recommend Flock as their browser of choice because "Flock is the best web browser or internet browser that you can download... and is endlessly customizable."

So hats off to you, Thirty Day Challenge! Thanks for the vote of confidence and good luck on your admirable mission.

Evan Hamilton
Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: flock, browser, thirtydaychallenge, 30DC, thirty day challenge, traffic, internet marketing

Google Toolbar Issues

Evan Hamilton — Tue, 5 Aug 2008 12:30:21 -0700

Hey Flockstars,

Last week an issue cropped up with the Google Toolbar and Flock 1.x. The short answer is: Google Toolbar is causing Flock 1.x to crash, so we've disabled it so you can continue to use Flock.

The long answer: This is not a matter of Google toolbar or Flock being broken: the toolbar is reading Flock 1.x's user agent string as Firefox 3, and trying to do things Flock 1.x can't do, causing a crash.

We've reported this issue to Google, and hopefully they will get the toolbar updated so it realizes that Flock 1.x is based on Firefox 2. You can help by submitting a report of this issue to Google at http://www.google.com/support/firefox/bin/request.py?contact_type=problem.

The toolbar should work just fine in the Flock 2 beta, which is based on Firefox 3. This is a great opportunity for you to grab Flock 2. Although though still in beta, the changes provided by Firefox 3 already make Flock 2.0 a vastly superior product. Beta 2 has largely been found to be stable, so making the switch is more likely to improve your browsing experience than hurt it. You can download it and find more information at http://www.flock.com/beta/download

Update: If you've installed Flock 2.0 Beta 2 on Windows and are still having issues with Google Toolbar, the following steps may help:

1. Uninstall the Google Toolbar.
2. Go to C:/Documents&Settings/[your username]/Application Data/Flock/Browser/Profiles/[profile folder...will be a series of numbers and letters]
3. Remove the blocklist.xml file
4. Install the Toolbar the next time you start Flock. Keep in mind that this will only work on the 2.0 Beta.

If you are on another operating system and would like similar instructions to accomplish this task, please email me directly at the email address listed below.

Evan Hamilton
Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: googletoolbar, google, toolbar, extension, crash, disabled, Flock, browser

Flock and the New Facebook

Mike Dosik — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:10:04 -0700

Hi Folks,

As many of you Facebook users may know, Facebook is in the process of rolling out some pretty dramatic changes to their website. They have been kind enough to make most of their changes available prior to
release for testing, but of course some things change along the way. Fortunately, to make your experience with transitioning to the new pages as seamless as possible, we've been able to make several updates to Flock before the new design is even generally available.

Nevertheless, we know of two issues with the new Facebook that we're still actively working to address. The first is that you can't update your Facebook status through Flock's people sidebar when using the new Facebook. Secondly, we're in the process of tweaking how Flock's drag-n-drop works with Facebook's overhaul of their Wall feature.

We hope to have fixes rolled out in the next week or so. Thanks in advance for your patience and keep on Flocking!

Mike

Blogged with the Flock Browser

If Fashion Is Your Thing? – Flock’s New Gloss Edition Is The Browser For You

Dan Burkhart — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:05:02 -0700

We’ve got a fun product to tell you about. Today, Flock launched its latest product that is geared towards people who are passionate about keeping up with Fashion, Entertainment and Lifestyle trends. Flock’s ‘Gloss Edition’ is the world’s first fashion and entertainment browser designed to help people keep up with the latest fashion trends and celebrity lifestyle scoop (o.k. gossip).

We’ve put together a bundle of the best sources on the Web to bring you your daily dose of fashion inspiration, celebrity dish, and trends by including over 35 leading content providers and partners, from Glam, PopSugar, InStyle, ThisNext, DesignerApparel, AllTop and others. The best part about it is that all of this information comes to you, and is updated immediately as news and images are published. You’ll never miss a beat and people will wonder how you stay on top of it all.

We’ve also worked with a great panel of women to design a theme for the Gloss Edition of Flock that is pink, ‘soft’, fun and well suited for the fashionistas’ never-ending pursuit of stylish individuality.

We had fun building the Gloss Edition and we hope you have fun with the experience that it delivers. Check it out, and please don’t keep it a secret. Tell your friends about Flock.com/gloss.

-Cheers

Dan Burkhart
Vice President, Marketing
Dan at flock dot com

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Would you like that Good, Great, or UN-BE-LIEVABLE?

Dan Burkhart — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:09:39 -0700

What if you sat down in a restaurant and the waiter asked you “…would you like that Good, Great, or UN-BE-LIEVABLE?” Of course you might ask about price, but if all options were free, of course you’d choose “UN-BE-LIEVABLE”.

That’s why we’ve been working so hard on our Flock 2 Beta, and our audience of loyal Flockstars has been growing so quickly. Everybody loves the latest improvements Mozilla’s Firefox 3 technology: much improved performance, tighter security and improved usability. However, what if you could have all of those great features AND all of the award-winning innovations that Flock offers? (That would be the integrated People, Media, WebMail, Photo Uploader, Blog Editor, Feed Reader, and more.) Today, we’re making our second beta of Flock 2 available for everyone to enjoy, and you can take your browsing experience from great…to UN-BE-LIEVABLE for free.

In this latest release of Flock 2 Beta (two) we’ve taken your feedback very much to heart and included over 175 bug fixes, and incorporated Mozilla’s latest security patch from their 3.0.1 release. Flock 2 Beta (two) is fast, even more stable and polished.

Now lets get back to the UN-BE-LIEVABLE part. Millions of people still keep their lives ‘organized’ on the Web by opening heaps of tabs. Those uninitiated to Flock often say “I don’t need anything to manage my stuff; I keep them open in tabs.” We believe this is not terribly different than ‘organizing’ your life by stacking papers all over your desk. People around the world are falling in love with Flock’s ability to help them remain connected to the variety of sites, services, and content that interests them, without stacking tabs all over their desktop. Flock keeps your world organized and brings your most important and interesting items and events to you.

Go ahead: order up the “UN-BE-LIEVABLE” version of browsing that leaves tired old conventional browsing in the dust…or, trapped under heaps of tabs.

You can get Flock 2 Beta (two) from http://www.flock.com/beta/download, where you can also find several articles detailing the improvements we’ve made.

-Enjoy

Dan Burkhart
Vice President, Marketing
Dan at flock dot com

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: flock, browser, flock 2, flock 2 beta 2, F2B2, mozilla, firefox 3, unbelievable, beta, beta 2

You Can't Make This Stuff Up #1

Evan Hamilton — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:51:12 -0700

I have a great job.

Every day, a large chunk of my day is spent reading feedback from Flockstars like you on Twitter, our forums, our blog, our feedback tool, across the blogsphere and beyond. I do a lot of logging of feature requests, troubleshooting and explaining features, but I also get to read an amazing amount of wonderful, positive feedback. I send the highlights out to the Flock staff, but I truly get to bask in all this great feedback. It's really heartening to see that we are making the web browsing experience so much better for so many people.

This feedback is so awesome, in fact, that I can't keep holding it in. I want to share this love, and give props to the folks who are telling the world how much they love Flock. Welcome to the first edition of "You Can't Make This Stuff Up", an ongoing segment in which I'll be reposting the love that people are giving to Flock.

If you wish for us to remove something you said or credit you differently, please contact me at evan at flock dot com. The opinions expressed on the blogs and Twitter accounts we link to are not those of me or Flock. Unless they're cool.

Flock 1.2 love

"If you are using web 2.0 tools you NEED to use the Flock browser: Flock rules! Goodbye FireFox. I'll miss you!"
Posted on Twitter by Brad Trnavsky

“The best thing that’s ever happened to me. For the Web 2.0 obsessed like me, this will make your life easier.”
Blog Post by Margot Stephenson

"Have been using Flock for 2 days now. The social integration is awesome! It is a step beyond Firefox as Firefox is beyond Internet Exploder."
Posted on Twitter by Bradley C Hughes

"It is the best browser I have ever used. Better than Firefox by a thousand miles, better than Safari by 10,000 miles, and better than Internet Explorer and Netscape by a million miles."
Blog Post by Susan Vaughn

Love for Flock 2 Beta (one):

"I am abusing flock 2.0b1 (26 tabs currently open) and its holding up like a dream "
Posted on Twitter by Ryan Skadberg

Holy hotcakes, batman! Flock 2.0 is blazing!!"
Posted on Twitter by Amy Hussey

"Hello permanent use of Flock 2, bye bye FireFox and Safari. It's loooove for this social media junkie.."
Posted on Twitter by Leslie

"Flock 2 + Firefox 3 engine = best browser ever"
Posted on Twitter by Max Barkhatov

Thanks so much to everyone who broadcasts their love of Flock every day. We appreciate it more than we can express, and I'm looking forward to publishing more of it in the next "You Can't Make This Stuff Up".

Flock'n'roll,

Evan Hamilton
Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: Flock, browser, love, Twitter, feedback, blogosphere, cyberdog

Hallo Deutschland!

Dan Burkhart — Tue, 1 Jul 2008 01:10:26 -0700

The recent surge of interest for the Flock browser has given us a lot of energy to make sure that we’re making the Flock experience available for as many people as possible around the world. As with most of our feature decisions, we looked at serving the largest audiences of users first, and so it was an easy decision for us to focus on our largest non-English speaking market of Germany to deliver our first ‘deeply localized’ build of Flock. The Social Web is exploding in Germany, and so it is natural that there are many fans of Flock interested in a more authentic, truly German experience. The Flock German edition is available here.

What does this mean? Well, our custom German experience is more than just ‘skin’ deep. The Flock DE edition ships with local content, media streams and service offerings from the most popular sites in Germany. (For example: sports content from sites like Sports1.de, and bundesliga.de rather than ESPN.com. News from Spiegel.de and FinancialTimes.de instead of CNN.com). Search services deliver German search results (for example, Yahoo.de, Amazon.de, eBay.de, Wikipedia.de, etc). Social sites like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube are defaulted to return the German experience.

We’re very proud of the German experience provided in the Flock DE version. We’re also looking forward to working with our dedicated volunteer localizers worldwide to continue rolling out similarly ‘deep localizations’ for other countries going forward. We plan to upgrade the DE edition to Flock 2 (built on the same technology as Firefox 3) as soon as our Flock 2 beta cycles are completed.

If you are a German speaking Flockstar and enjoy the German Flock experience, please help us spread the word and let people know that there is a much better way to experience the Web, with Flock.

-Cheers/Prost

Dan Burkhart

Vice President, Marketing
dan at flock dot com

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: flock, browser, Germany, Deutschland, DE, mozilla, localization

Flock 2 with Firefox 3 inside = WOW!

Dan Burkhart — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:47:25 -0700

Hello all,

With all of the attention around the imminent release of Mozilla’s Firefox 3 technology, we’ve been beaming with enthusiasm about what’s in store for Flock fans. Last night, we pushed our public beta (one) of Flock 2 live. Flock 2 incorporates all of the latest features found in Flock’s recent public release, but it runs on the latest and greatest Firefox 3 technology from Mozilla. So now you don’t have to abandon your love affair with your new favorite browser to check out the latest performance, security and feature enhancements from Mozilla. We’ve got them all right here for you!

Flock 2 is FAST. Manages memory better, and is more secure, thanks to Mozilla’s Firefox 3 technology.

As with all beta software, you might experience some imperfections. We’ve all been running the Flock 2 beta internally for several months, gathering our notes and fixing these imperfections as they arise, but now we could really use your assistance to make Flock 2 the only choice for those that refuse to stand still, and refuse to accept a world in which their browser just browses for them.

The Flock 2 beta marks a very important watershed moment for us. And we have some amazing things planned for the remainder of the year, so please help us refine this product by running Flock 2 beta (one), and logging imperfections by using the ‘bug icon’ in the upper right of your browser.

We will make the full migration to an official release of Flock 2 as soon as possible, pending your feedback.

We’ve got fuel in our tanks, and we’re here to show the world how much they’ve been missing by using plain browsers. Get on board, and help us out by sending your comments, love, enthusiasm, and of course…by telling your friends about Flock!

Our mission is all about you!

-Dan Burkhart

VP of Marketing
dan at flock dot com

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: flock2, flock, browser, firefox3, firefox 3, mozilla, beta

Flock Welcomes Digg and Pownce, and Looks Toward Firefox 3 Integration

Dan Burkhart — Mon, 2 Jun 2008 18:03:16 -0700

The beta period for Flock’s 1.2 browser is now officially over. Although we continually juggle inbound requests for new service integrations, we couldn’t be happier about this latest release with Digg and Pownce built in. Two weeks ago, we released the Flock 1.2 beta and have since been inundated with heaps of great encouraging comments from our users. Although we’re generally not driven by an interest in feeding the vices of our users, the words ‘addicting’ and ‘addictive’ have been used more than ever in the way that we’ve seen our browser described since we integrated Digg and Pownce into the experience.

"Really like the Digg button. Far too addictive! You have a magnificent product."

Go nuts! We love it too! Now that we’ve really got things cooking for you, we’re ready to offer a peek into our next round of progress. Within the coming weeks Flock will release it’s first beta of Flock 2.0, which incorporates the Mozilla technology that powers Firefox 3. So get ready to have all of the latest performance (memory management), security and feature enhancements found in the latest Firefox 3 release along with the unique user experience innovations only delivered by the Flock browser.

If you’re finding yourselves addicted now, then we’ll be anxious to hear from you when you have the features you love, running on the latest Mozilla technology we’re all raving about.
As always, if you’ve become a convert to the Flock browser, please tell a friend to check us out and…Digg us!

-Cheers

Dan Burkhart
Vice President, Marketing
dan at flock dot com

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: Flock, Browser, Digg, Pownce, Firefox3, "Firefox 3, "Flock 2.0 beta