Flock should develop a “lite” or “simple” version of their browser. Currently their browser can be overwhelming to the average mainstream Internet user and it frankly probably scares a lot of people away after the initial load. What I’d like to see are three new “lite” versions:

• Flock with Twitter panel
• Flock with Facebook panel
• Flock with Twitter and Facebook panels

That’s it. No MySpace, no Bebo, no Flickr, none of it. Just a browser that includes a sidebar for Twitter and/or Facebook. There are plenty of new social desktop applications like Tweetdeck but these also focus on the over sharing crowd.

Now imagine a browser that takes the simple Twitter.com interface plus a browser and combines them together. Flock 2.5 allows you to easily drag-and-drop items from the browser to Twitter/Facebook and that functionality should remain. That’s what I think Flock Lite should be. Nice and simple which will appeal to the mainstream, average Facebook/Twitter user. I’d also like to see an installation wizard that makes setting up the browser amazingly easy. Over time Flock can move the user to the full Flock browser.

What I found most interesting in the new Flock release is the ability to drag-and-drop items from one network to another. If you want to share a photo from Flickr to your friends on Twitter, you can just drag the photo to the Twitter window and a message will be created with a link to the image. The Twitter integration continues with the ability to save searches into a sidebar for each viewing. It’s almost as if Flock has integrated a mini-desktop app (e.g. tweetdeck) with the full browser functionality.

The new “Flockcast” functionality is also a great addition. Flockcast allows you to broadcast your items to multiple networks. If you share a Flickr photo, you can select to share the item to Facebook as well. Flock says this can also help bloggers because content uploaded to a blog via Flock can be broadcast to multiple networks at once using the Flockcast option.

Flock has also announced that it has integrated Bebo into the browser. Flock self-reports that the browser is used in over 14,000 cities and over 192 countries and territories.

Lastly the new Flock browser has integrated Facebook chat so you can converse with your Facebook friends directly from the browser. The drag-and-drop functionality I noted above is also available with the Facebook chat option.

The updates should be well received by loyal Flock users as they increase the ability to share content along with usability improvements that should increase overall usage.

Chris Nuttall at the Financial Times has commentary from CEO Shawn Hardin.

The Flock browser has launched an interesting marketing effort today. They want you to skip all of those things and instead give your sweetie a Flock browser. Flock marketing VP Dan Burkhart notes in a blog post, "This Valentine’s Day, we’d like you to turn your friends on to the browser that helps put people together. Instead of handing off an unoriginal box of chocolates, tell the people you care about to download Flock and you’ll be turning them on to a browser that inspires people to stay connected with the friends and things they care about most in their lives.  Take it a step further and offer a personal tutorial to show this person how to get their accounts set up, and voila – you’ll find that your Valentine will be impressed and amazed by what a guru you are."

Somehow I am thinking if you show up with a usb key with a demo video and a Flock installation, you might head home early. 

It will be interesting to hear from Dan on how the campaign went – since they create customized versions, it might be neat to create a valentine’s day edition where you can create a pre-set layout with images, videos, etc. I give Dan much credit for trying out the idea!

MySpace, Flock and Vidoop jointly developed OpenID for Flock which should help the Flock browser gain additional user adoption. OpenID for Flock is now available to all Flock 2.0 users as an alpha extension — my hope is that it becomes part of the default install over time. The companies note, "The MySpace, Flock and Vidoop (OpenID) implementation is a reference design released as open source under GPL, and as such, modifications by developers will be brought together and shared with the wider open source developer community."

Perhaps today’s announcement will push the other major browsers (IE, FF, Safari, Opera, etc.) to start looking at implementing OpenID into the browser as well. I am not talking about an extension or plugin, but rather a full integrated environment. If OpenID is going to gain in popularity and usability, it’s critical that using an OpenID login as easy as possible.

With all of the talk over the last few days about Facebook Connect, it sure does look like eventually we will have an old-style Western duel setup. Facebook Connect vs. OpenID – let’s get it on!

Flock

The major updates in the Flock 2.0 release include MySpace integration, Media RSS accessibility. The company also notes that the new version is based on Firefox 3 and has a host of improvements and users should find memory management much improved over the 1.0 release.

Flock VP of Marketing & Business Development Dan Burkhart took me through the new version last week and shared some download stats. To-date there has been 6 million downloads and 3.6 million of the total are from the 1.0 release. I asked Dan who is their target user and he replied that the target user utilizes 2 or more social services and if you do use 2 or more, you will see a benefit by using Flock.

Dan and I also discussed the ad downturn that might be approaching and he noted that the current Flock monetization is double the plan numbers. He also pointed to their Series D raise from 2 months ago of $15 million.

The big push for the company now is the college market. Dan says that the college market could prove very beneficial for Flock as most students are using multiple social services.

I’ve been using the Flock version launching tonight for the last week and I see a performance improvement over the prior versions. Although on my Pentium 4 desktop, I still find it lags behind IE and FF in load times and certainly behind Chrome. Flock reminds me of a new couch. At first it’s hard and a bit uncomfortable but after you sit on it a few times, you find the sweet spot and life is grand. Flock requires a lot of setup but once it’s customized to your needs, it works well. The key for Flock is figuring out how to get users to their sweet spot as quick as possible.

Within the Flock Gloss browser, there are news feeds and pre-set favorites along with a pink design (see below). My guess is that we will see a variety of these customized versions from Flock this year as they try to gain market share in the browser market.

Check out all of our Flock coverage including the launch of their Eco-Green and German versions.

It’s more than just a language translation – the browser is rich with German language content. They call this conversion, "deep localized". Dan Burkhart notes, "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." 

And Flock says more localized versions will be coming soon as soon as the "dedicated volunteer localizers worldwide" offer up their free labor.

Today they are announcing the Flock 2.0 Beta which is built on top of the Firefox 3 platform. Flock is a social media browser – they have created a browser which helps social media junkies save time and effort when working with blogs, images, videos, etc. The new version offers a variety of enhancements including security updates and improved performance.

Most of the people I’ve spoken with over the past year have tried Flock but eventually go back to Firefox. Let’s see if the 2.0 version is able to keep their core audience engaged, installed and actually using the browser on a regular basis.

You can download the beta here. Anyone else find it interesting that they made this announcement the day before Firefox Download Day?

Update from Flock: Flock reported a 400+ percent increase in revenue and a 250+ percent increase in users since January 2008.

Update: Webware has a good review of Flock 2.

In honor of Earth Day, Flock recently launched a special edition of their popular browser with an unprecedented promise, to donate 10% of revenue generated from the niche browser’s searches to charity; and after winning an award for community at SXSW, the charity will be selected by none other than the Flock community itself.

So what does this have to do with Alltop? Well, rather than trying to aggregate "Green" content on their own, the folks at Flock made a smart move and brokered a deal with Guy to use Green.Alltop.com as the special edition’s homepage.

In the end, Flock increases distribution and continues to improve their rep., Alltop.com gets turnkey traffic, and some lucky charity will hopefully get a bunch of money. Sounds like a good Earth Day to me.

You can download the Eco-Edition of Flock here and if you feel like extending your browsing good even further, add the Effortless Good extension. In addition to your searches generating money for charity, any time you shop at Amazon, a portion of your purchase will split among 4 non-profits.

With several years of startup experience already behind him, Rick Kenney is a senior Mass Comm. student and Marketing Intern with The Participatory Culture Foundation, the people behind Miro.

Editor’s note: Flock is a current CN sponsor.

From the Netscape blog:

Previously, the Netscape Team recommended that Netscape browser users adopt Firefox as their next web browser. We would also like to suggest Flock as another alternative to the Netscape web browser. Flock is a web browser that combines all of the advantages of Firefox with the addition of social integration. If you are looking for your next browser and are interested in Firefox with social integration, give Flock a try.

Flock has also announced version 1.1 of their browser this week at the MacWorldExpo. If you’d like to learn more about Flock, check out my interview with Flock CEO Shawn Hardin from late 2007.

Overall I would say that the comparisons to Firefox are no longer warranted. This is a very powerful browser for those of you who use social networking and social media heavily. There is a pretty hefty initial setup curve to get all of your social accounts setup but you only have to do this once.

The first thing Shawn walked me through is what he calls the "differentiated value bar" – which is shown below. The options here expose the power of Flock and include a Web Clipboard which basically allows you to quickly save any bit of content by dragging it to the clipboard. Items are saved until you remove them.

Also included are a feed sidebar which is basically a slick feed manager, media bar manager and one click access to blogging and uploading.

The Media Bar is a way to see your (and your friends) media in a quick and efficient way. The "media streams" stay updated in real-time so if your friend adds a new image that falls into one of your defined areas, it will appear automatically. The Media Bar works with all of the services that are incorporated in Flock (listed below). Inside the media streams window there is a search option to search your streams and/or search your providers. A quicker way to get to the media you need than going to each individual site.

Currently Flock 0.9 has the following media services setup:

• Media Sharing: Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube
• Blogging: Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, Typepad, Wordpress.com, Xanga, Self Hosted (I couldn't get it to work with Drupal)
• Online Favorites: del.icio.us, Magnolia

Flock continues to allow one click blogging and uploading. They have beefed up the upload tool which allows you to resize, rotate, etc to any photo and create tags and descriptions for each one or for a batch. Then you upload the media to any service you have setup. On the flickr upload example, it's like the standalone flickr uploader on steroids.

Other features include a bug/feedback system, one click favorites (love this); "My World" which is basically a start page that keeps track of your favorite sites, feeds and media; and the ability to save favorites locally, online or both.

Shawn closed the demo by saying he is most excited about the updates coming this summer and the 1.0 release in the early fall which will include some significant upgrades (he wouldn't tell me what they are). My suggestion is simple… if you are a heavy user of the social tools listed above, give Flock a try. If you tried it before and gave up, I would take another look. I am impressed by what I saw and while this isn't the browser for everyone, their target audience should find a great value in Flock.

• Flock has offices in Mountain View and in Canada
• 1.5 million downloads of the 0.7 Flock browser
• 450k cumulative users this year – Shawn kept thanking the users during the call
• The next version – 0.9 is in private beta currently and will deploy in 3-4 weeks
• The 1.0 version will be available in late summer

Shawn said he is most excited about the following two things:

• That Flock has a roadmap for the next 12+ months
• They have executional and operational capability throughout the year

We talked about their general strategy:

• Supporting and enhancing the social dimension
• As integrated as possible with social media
• Heavy focus on the user
• They have a usability lab which looks at usage over time

Lastly we spoke about their revenue model:

• 60-140 million folks who value social experience <– this is their target
• Shawn noted that Firefox is currently averaging about $3 per user per year using their Google Partnership. Flock currently shares revenue with Yahoo on the same type of basis

I think Flock has to get some good publicity out there. It seems more times than not when I hear about Flock it is something either not-so-positive or negative (such as people leaving the company). I also think Flock should look at creating some videos on why Flock is better than just using Firefox plus x social tool. Does it save me time? Show me. Does it save me hardware? Show me.

I also suggested that Shawn create a "State of the Flock" video which goes over some of the parts of the roadmap. Text is fine but he is very passionate and that is just nearly impossible to have come out in text. Create a video. Show the team. Let them say why Flock is the best. Then explain that Flock has a plan for the long-term so that the users can really believe that if they switch, they won't be left for lost in a few months.

I have been working with Flock's PR team for a couple of months now to schedule a time for me to meet with new Flock CEO, Shawn Hardin. We should be able to connect next week and I will report back after our discussion. I am very interested in learning more about what Flock is working on and their new leadership vision.

If you have any questions you would like me to ask Shawn, please leave them in the comments.

Grab the RSS Feed and always know the instant we post other interviews.

Click the start button below to begin the audio interview (or download the mp3):

Below is a text transcript of the audio interview.

Allen: How did you guys come up with the idea for Flock?
Geoffrey: At the time I was working at Real Networks as product manager for the real player and my cofounder was working for the Mozilla Foundation. This was in very late 04 to early 05. We were seeing a revolution on several fronts. The browser space was becoming reinvigorated thanks to Firefox. So 10 years of dormancy in the browser space was coming to an end. The other thing was that Microsoft was falling all over itself. There was also a revolution in user generated content, and this was anything from blogs to videos and photos. And other innovative things like delicious were starting to take off as well. So I talked to my cofounder and we were thinking about what we like about our jobs and what would we do differently. It quickly dawned on us that we like the consumer space and the internet space and wanted to be part of the participation revolution so looking at what tools were available to us it seemed clear to us that the Mozilla platform was a wonderful one to work from. It is open source, we both believe in open source. Users are passionate about it, we felt that Firefox was focusing on the right things at the time. We thought it was a great opportunity to look at extending the platform to address a different set of users.

Allen: What’s the meaning behind the name Flock?
Geoffrey: We held group sessions and brainstorming sessions to figure out what would be the best name. The one thing that kept rising to the top was people kind of coming together and expressing themselves with some degree of organization. It was like formation, expression and so I was thinking of things that capture things like Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist wasn’t very catchy for a browser and had already been used and I also wanted something kind of catchy and snazzy. My wife mentioned a few different words. Most were animal behaviours that didn’t sound quite as good and then it just dawned on me, Flock. I think she said something like herd, hive. But when you think of a flock, groups of people flocking to something. Something that captures the essence of a hotspot that is capturing people’s attention. There you have it. I came up with it and then went out and bought the domain name and the rest is history.

Allen: Did you start with funding or self-funded entity?
Geoffrey: We started mostly just working for free, just me and the co-founded. We worked in the off hours to build the business plan to see if this is a viable company or just an interesting project. Once we realized that this was something we wanted to dedicate our full-time to, we generated a small amount of seed funding, which was then added to by two other rounds of funding, an A round and a B round. Our last round of funding was last November (2005) where we got a full and proper C round.

Allen: What is the current revenue model look like for Flock?
Geoffrey: So it’s going pretty much as we expected. Browsers are not a new business. Just like Firefox uses Google as its default search, we do something similar with our search partners. So basically that means the browser is free, we get a share of the revenue from searches directed to our search partners.

Allen: So are you still doing the Amazon affiliation?
Geoffrey: Yes, they are a partner.

Allen: What can you talk about in the technology behind Flock?
Geoffrey: The browser is built entirely upon the Mozilla platform. Essentially it is exactly the Firefox codebase under the hood. We license from Mozilla and share back to them whenever we have fixes. Anything beyond that is also developed on the same technology platform. We use XUL, which is the same language used to develop the browser, same rendering engine. Extensions to the platform are developed in C++.

Allen: Can you talk about the about:Duck project?
Geoffrey: Oh Duck project? If you go to flock.com/about/duck you will see all of the Flock employees on a Duck. It is really a top secret project that we don’t talk about.

Allen: So if you share with me, you would have to kill me kind of thing?
Geoffrey: Yea, or just find a way to silence you. But I would prefer not to have to go down that path.

Allen: Can you talk about who your main competitors are?
Geoffrey: So the easiest way to explain it is that it really depends on which perspective you are looking at the browser from. Certainly if you view Flock as just a web browser, then any other web browser could be a good subsitute for Flock. But from my perspective we like to think about it as the first product that takes into consideration the full lifecycle of web content from finding it, sharing it, consuming it, and to creating new content. Those are the 4 aspects. I probably got them out of order. So when you look at the browser from that perspective there are individual companies or products that might be demand subsitutes for any one of our features but in terms of harnessing the overall lifecycle of web content there really no one that is doing it quite to the extent that we are. I joke sometimes when people ask me about who is our main competitior and sometimes I think that it is ourselves. We are always asking tough questions about what problems we are trying to solve and how we can solve these problems and make a fun experience for folks.

Allen: If you have a chance to make any friends since starting Flock. Other software companies, other projects that you meet with regularly?
Geoffrey: Absolutely, our biggest and earliest partner was Yahoo!. So we worked very closely with Yahoo! and they are e-products are well integrated into Flock. Outside of Yahoo! one of our absolute biggest and best partners is Photobucket. If you go to photobucket.com, you will see they actually distribute Flock. We have worked very nicely with them to get them integrated into the browser and it’s interesting not to long ago few people in the valley heard of photobucket. They were based in Denver and they now have on the order of 26 million users. These users are very active in social networking and in the blogosphere and they seemed like a perfect fit. So for us, its been a perfect partnership and we meet with them once or twice a week. And there are an upcoming partnership that I can’t talk about yet but there will be 1 or 2 major partnerships coming up that will share some light on where this is going.

Allen: Can you talk a little bit about your user demographics?
Geoffrey: This is always a tough question for me as I don’t like to draw lines in the sand but I would say its primarily folks that are active in either “power consumption” or “power expression” online. And what I mean by that is some folks casual web users maybe use the web browser once a week and either end of the age demo then they are probably not in our target. What we are finding is the people who are using Flock the most are people are really keen that want to be in the know and keep up-to-date. And that can take various forms, it can take active bloggers, people that are participating in social networks, people who like to share photos online.

Allen: Since you are about a year old, do you believe you have accomplished what you set out to do?
Geoffrey: Absolutely, I am a lot more confident in Flock’s potential for success now than I have ever been but I have a lot more understanding about how hard it is to build a quality product. A year ago I might have assumed that by now we would be out the door with a 1.0 product. You know it is still about a month and half off. Yea, I am confident but I realize now it is a lot more work than expected. The good news is that we have a great team in place. We just passed the 30 mark and have one of the best engineering teams assembled.

Allen: Do you see Flock becoming a mainstream browser?
Geoffrey: Absolutely and in fact our downloads outside of the tech and geek community have been skyrocketing and that’s largely because folks are starting to realize that we are more than just focused on the blogosphere. When the project got some early recognition, it was mainly geeks like myself. The way we are designing the product is so that its useful and enjoyable for anyone who wants to do things like share photos online and that anyone that wants to participate can.

Allen: I was looking at Mashable and on September 13, 2006 they noted that the Flock CEO jumped ship and that Flock is an unnecessary product. They also noted that the Photobucket partnership is helping. Can you speak a little bit to this and about why Flock is necessary.

Geoffrey: Let me draw a bit of color on both sides. When we started Flock, my partner and I sat around a table with our original investor and mapped out the future of the company would look like and how we would want to grow it and for starters Bart did not quit Flock. That was a big misstatement that was picked up by folks. When we started the company, Bart and the investor were like you will be CEO for a year but if this things starts to take off we will want some professional management and that’s what happened. He was here for just over a year and just had a baby two weeks before the board made the decision and the board is actively seeking someone who has a lot of industry experience and can make the partnerships happen.

You know I am not in the business of telling people what they need. I think a lot of companies make that mistake. What we want to do is create something that we think is really useful and fun and people will vote with their downloads. What we have noticed of late is that we have to ask ourselves questions about what compels users. We do a lot of outreach and speak to Flock users. We have a lot of loyal users that submit feedback and help make it a product they will enjoy. We think we are speaking to the right group of people and they are voting and expressing their interest by continuing to use the product.

Allen: What are the top 2-3 things since you have started Flock?
Geoffrey: One thing that I have learned is that I find it very difficult to build successful products if you are not totally passionate about them or at least for me. I think with what Flock is trying to do we need to make sure we are always building a product that we passionately believe in and we believe will make an impact on the world.

The other thing I have discovered is that you really need to listen to what users are telling you. There are sometimes when others outside of the organization can really open your mind and we have gotten much better about it and in both getting feedback from users who love the tool but also those who hate it and uninstall it. It is important to speak to both sets of users.

The last thing I have learned is it is really difficult to build the right product. You have got to surround yourself with a great team. Hiring must be done well. My advice to anyone is that you grow your team with the right people. It is a lot more expensive to learn later on that you did not hire the right people.

Allen: What would you say is the top mistake since you started?
Geoffrey: I think the top mistake would be a combination of my 2nd point above (listening to users). When I was at MIT for grad school I took this class called Listening to the Consumer and it given all the math classes I was taking, I thought this would be a slam dunk. But 4 years later it really takes a lot of discipline to see what needs you are addressing. So what I have learned is that you don’t build anything until you have a plan for what you are trying to accomplish and for whom you are trying to accomplish this mission.

Allen: Where do you see Flock going in the next 1-3 years?
Geoffrey: So where I see Flock going is I expect it will be a little more of a platform then it currently is today. When someone launches Flock we want it to enable interaction. Once these core interactions are understood, I want people to take advantage of the fact that it is open source and that they will work with it. We have done most of the integrations including Flickr, Photobucket and Webshots will be in soon, Yahoo! Photos is another one. In terms of one offs – we can integrate it with a variety of different products and services. I would love it if the architecture that you can integrate anything you want with the browser. I want it to be as open as possible so anyone can choose to integrate anything they want to.

Allen: Where do you see the Browser going in the next 1-3 years?
Geoffrey: I view the browser as a great facilitator of interaction. And right now we are just focusing on nailing these experiences on the PC but I would have to agreed with Ted that the browser will become more and more pervasive whether on computers or on consoles. The question is how can you make the experience consistent across all of these and using Flock on all of these devices allows for a seamless integration. I want to make sure whatever we build that we are always mindful of the fact that the intended interaction should never be subordinate to the technology delivered or consumed.

Allen: Do you have any other thoughts about Flock that you want to share?
Geoffrey: If there is a message to the world, I would like to say thank you to the users who have stuck around and really helped us evolve and grow. For those who have not tried us out, I really encourage you to check out the latest beta and keep your eyes and ears peeled on the upcoming news and releases. This is certainly going to be an exciting quarter for us.

Well we have reached the end of our interview with Geoffrey. Thanks to Geoffrey for participating and to Mike at Atomic PR for setting everything up.

If you would like to participate in a conversation on CenterNetworks, or if you have any comments or questions, you can contact me via e-mail at allen===at===centernetworks.com or visit CenterNetworks for all of our news, reviews, insights and conversations.

Technorati Tags: Flock | Geoffrey Arone | interviews | center networks