Wow. We honestly didn't prepare a speech for this event...

A few weeks back, Flock was humbled to have been nominated amongst such esteemed heavyweights as Facebook, Bebo, Ning and ChangeEverything.ca for the annual Webby Awards in the Social Networking category. Late last night, we were alerted that Flock won the Webby Award for this incredibly competitive category. For a 40 person company, filled with passionate individuals who have been working late nights and straight through weekends, this is a very pleasant, unexpected, and flattering surprise!

This year marked the 12th annual Webby Awards ceremony. They received over 10,000 nominations from 60+ countries worldwide. The Webbys have long been recognized as a very special acknowledgement of the companies that are leading in key areas of excellence and innovation. Past Webby Award winners have included: Amazon.com, eBay, Yahoo!, iTunes, Google, NPR, Salon Magazine, Evite, Meetup, Wikipedia, Flickr, PBS, and The Onion.

We are delighted about receiving this prestigious award, and would also like to congratulate Facebook for winning the People's Voice award within the same category. We're very close with the good folks over at Facebook and always appreciate what good partners they have been to Flock.

As always, we continue to be grateful to the millions of users around the world who have downloaded Flock, and to those that continue to champion Flock as a fun, fresh and innovative alternative to conventional browsers.

Thanks to the Judges of the Webby Awards, as well as our own Community of Flockstars for making the first third of 2008 a wild success.

-Cheers!

Dan Burkhart

Vice President, Marketing

dan at flock dot com

It wasn’t that long ago when people were buzzing about the (then) whiz kid, Marc Andreessen, and his amazing Mosaic browser, which later resulted in the explosive growth and meteoric rise  of the Netscape browser. Netscape not only brought the Internet to the masses, but it played a role in changing the world. It goes without saying that the innovation was too important to go unnoticed.

That same spirit of innovation that brought the original Netscape browser to 90% of our desktops, and ultimately the open-source Mozilla Project.  This started the populist movement inspiring developers from around the world to contribute code for the collective call-to-action of out-innovating its formidable competitor. Somewhere between the punk-rock appeal of the Boston Tea Party, and the socialist ideal of thousands of developers connected by a desire to work together to build a superior product, the Open Source movement flourished better than ever before. With AOL’s support, the Mozilla Project became the Mozilla Foundation, and Firefox became the rallying cry for users seeking a more secure, better performing, innovative browser built by the people, for the people.

Our charter here at Flock has been made possible in part by coupling the same innovative spirit that pioneering Netscape developers used to bring browsing to the masses, with the foundation of shared technology that Mozilla’s Open Source charter generously makes available to us. We have been invigorated by the daily emails and positive comments we receive from our users, and feel confident that Flock is playing an important role of keeping the spirit of innovative browser evolution alive and well.

With the decision to cease ongoing support of the Netscape browser, we are honored to have the support and endorsement of AOL and Netscape, who have introduced Flock to millions of loyal Netscape users as AOL sunsets ongoing support for the Netscape products in the field. Tom Drapeau  from Netscape has been instrumental in helping increase awareness of the Flock browser, and by doing so has introduced a global audience of people to the unique experience that only the Flock browser delivers.

Flock is designed to support and enhance the way that we use the web today. We appreciate Tom’s assistance in helping get the word out, and encourage you to be a champion of innovation by telling your friends about your experience with Flock as well. If you like the idea of people working late nights to deliver a free product to you, so that you can get more enjoyment out of your daily web experience, please lend a hand.

Netscape ruled, and now Flock rocks! We’re committed to keeping the Netscape’s original spirit of innovation alive and well.

-Many Thanks

Dan Burkhart

VP of Marketing
dan at flock dot com

Update: Flock 1.1.1 does fix all the People sidebar issues. You should receive an automatic update to 1.1.1 shortly, or you can manually upgrade by downloading it from www.flock.com. Localized updates are slightly behind schedule because of a build server issue, but should be out in the next day or so.

Hello Folks,

We’ve become aware that some Flock users have recently been experiencing issues with their Facebook People sidebar not logging in. Even though everyone can still log into Facebook, the much loved People sidebar is not logging in as it should.

We continue to make good progress on this matter. For the broad majority of users, downloading the latest version of Flock from our homepage will provide the fix you are looking for. If you download the latest version of Flock and you are still experiencing problems with your Facebook People sidebar, we’d like to hear from you at flock-feedback2 at flock dot com.

We will be pushing out an automatic upgrade to the latest version of Flock (version 1.1.1) shortly to make sure that all those affected with this authentication problem have their lives returned to normal Flock goodness.

-Thanks for hanging in there with us

Dan Burkhart
VP of Marketing
dan at flock dot com

Update:This problem has been solved in Flock 1.1.1. To fix the sidebar issue please download and install Flock 1.1.1 from www.flock.com or by going to Help>Check for Updates. Thanks for your patience and help!

We've seen reports that some folks are logging into Facebook as usual, but the People sidebar in Flock isn't opening.  It's as if the login to the page is working, but the additional features in Flock aren't available (specifically the People sidebar isn't recognizing the login). That's exactly what's happening: for reasons we don't yet fully understand, the Facebook API is not allowing authentication in these cases.

These symptoms don't seem to be very wide-spread, but until we've determined and fixed the API issue you might see this behavior.  If you do, here's how to work around it.  With the help of some Flockstars out there we've gotten a hold of Facebook accounts that exhibit this problem, and we've discovered the following work-around: in all cases we have found that clicking the 'Accounts' or the 'Privacy' link on facebook.com will "kick-start" the API authentication, and the People bar will start working again.

If you are logging into Facebook and not seeing the People sidebar as usual, please click on Privacy or Accounts on the facebook.com page. This should make API come to life and allow the authentication you need for your people to flow into the sidebar.  If clicking either Accounts or Privacy on the facebook.com page doesn't return things to normal, please let us know (flock-feedback2 at flock dot com).

We will work with the fine folks over at facebook.com to get a permanent solution to this in the coming days.  In the meantime, please follow the instructions above, and accept our apologies for this temporary inconvenience.

Thank you

-Dan Burkhart

VP of Marketing

dan at flock dot com

Hot off the press, blogging live from this year's South By Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin TX. Flock won for best showing in the Community category. No doubt in large part to the raving support of our loyal community, who keep championing Flock as the best browser for the way we use the web today. Given the always interesting crowd of entrepreneurs and trend-setters at SXSW, we couldn't be happier about this acknowledgement of Flock. Thank you, SXSW.

We’re very excited to tell you about our latest release, so let’s cut to the chase: Flock 1.1 is here.  You can download it via any of the download buttons here on flock.com (the installer will upgrade older builds of Flock to 1.1 and retain your data).  We will be turning on automatic updates from 1.0.9 to 1.1 in the coming weeks.

The team has been hard at work here at Flock, and we’re now extremely proud to extend the public beta version of our next product for you to test and enjoy. You can get it here. We hope you’ll not only test out the Flock 1.1 beta, but also let us know what you think about the latest additions of Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Picasa integrated directly into your favorite browser. We’ve also made some very exciting improvements to the MyWorld page, which we’re sure you’re going to love.

Here’s the quick summary of what’s new in the 1.1 Beta:

Every year, the South By Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin brings people together to “uncover the best new websites and celebrate those who are building and implementing tomorrow's online trends”. This year, Flock has been selected as a finalist for web awards issued in the “Community” category of sites and services. A list of all finalists in all categories is posted here.

We’ve always been a big fan of the South By Southwest conference. It’s original goal was “…to create an event that would act as a tool for creative people and the companies they work with to … bring together people from a wide area to meet and share ideas”. They’ve consistently put on a good event by bringing smart, innovative, cool people together in the great city of Austin to have a good time and engage in interesting discussions about the latest ideas happening on the web. 

This aligns very nicely our goal and vision for what we’ve embarked on doing for you, the users of the Flock browser. Flock’s charter is to continually develop a far superior browsing experience by allowing people to continually engage with their favorite communities and services, no matter where they are on the web. Once people get familiar with Flock, they find great comfort with a nice blend of freedom and connected-ness in their daily lives online.

We’re delighted that Flock has been identified, amongst other impressive peers, as a company that is leading today’s innovation in the area of Community. It goes without saying, that ALL of the credit for this recognition goes to you, the community of Flock users, who have been providing such spirited feedback, and spreading the word about Flock so quickly. Your enthusiasm is fueling better innovation, making Flock a better product, and helping more people discover that there is a much better browser choice available to suit their needs.

We’re looking forward to attending the SXSW conference and mixing it up with the many great people doing interesting things on the Web.

Please drop us a line by twittering to ‘flocker’ if you’re heading to SXSW.

-Cheers

Dan Burkhart

VP Marketing
dan at flock dot com

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Hello Everyone,

As a new addition to the team here at Flock, I’d like to take a moment to share some of my first impressions with you.  This is likely my last chance to offer the candid perspective of the ‘new guy’. First of all, it’s great to be here. Let me briefly explain why.

Flock is preparing for a very important milestone in our company’s history. We are on the cusp of completing Flock 1.0, which integrates your friends from your favorite social services into the browser, paving the way for easy communication and sharing with people you care about, no matter where you are on the Web. This is by no means a modest ambition.

Nobody at Flock joined to take on modest ambitions. In this next version we’ve built a browser that integrates 15 popular services from around the Web, and succeeded in allowing them to work well with each other, which we believe to be a tremendous accomplishment. We’re quite proud of what we’ve done and look forward to hearing your impressions after you have the opportunity to familiarize yourself with the product. We’re hopeful that you too will become ‘dyed in the wool’ converts who can’t imagine browsing any other way.

In my brief tenure here at Flock, I’ve quickly arrived at a sense of great appreciation for the many elements that need to be in place in order to deliver a noteworthy and important product innovation. In most cases, there needs to be an ever-changing combination of vision, talent, focus, and flexibility (and these elements don’t naturally co-exist well together). I’ve been impressed by the incredible concentration of talent here at Flock, and how these elements have all been balanced to complete such an ambitious product vision.

Along with our excitement around the release of Flock 1.0, we’re collectively challenged and inspired by our ambitious roadmap ahead. No rest for the weary here. We’re just now scratching the surface of what we believe the Flock browser is capable of delivering.

Longfellow said, “most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.”

I think we would have liked that guy, and he clearly would be an avid Flock user.

We are now in the midst of our private beta and will be sharing a public release candidate for Flock in the coming weeks.  Flock 1.0 is on it’s final approach, and it’s well worth the wait.

-Dan

Blogged with Flock