Flock Blog

Hello again,

We are delighted to introduce the first beta release of the Flock browser, aka Flock 0.7. Here's what it is, what it isn't, and a company update.

Back in October, when we introduced the company and released our first developer preview, we generated quite a bit of attention. A lot of people were intrigued by the concepts we introduced, but one of the critiques we heard over and over was that the product wasn't ready for prime time (it wasn't - the version number was 0.4.something, but we did brag a bit too much). Moreover, some people wondered what problem we were trying to solve that Firefox plus a set of extensions couldn't solve. For the last six months or so, we've kept our nose to the grindstone, and now we're inviting you to try out our first beta release.

What problems are we trying to solve?
The web, and the way people engage online, has evolved dramatically over the past decade. We still see a lot of room for the browser to keep pace with everything that's going on on the web. Providing a fast, safe and simple browsing experience is very important, but at Flock we are also trying to look more broadly at how the web browser can enrich users' online experience.

For this release, and for at least the next year or so, we are primarily focused on supporting the social dimension of the web, and on bringing information closer to the user. Right now this includes a heavy emphasis on the photo experience (from upload through discovery to notification), RSS support, dramatic improvements to the search box (including a new take on favorites), and blogging.

In each of these areas, our goal is to offer an integrated experience that's easy to use and that leverages modern web standards. We are trying to build a web browser for the tens of millions of users for whom social engagement (sharing pictures, talking to existing friends and discovering new ones) is what they enjoy doing online. That includes people on MySpace, LiveJournal, FaceBook and YouTube, for example. If you are a power user (hint: if you use del.icio.us or a news reader or if you visit Digg, that probably means you) and if you have decorated your browser with, oh, say, 20 extensions or more, Flock may not be for you. We like these services as much as you do, and we share the basic values of transparency and control that are an essential component of the participatory web. We are trying to bring these services to mere mortals.

What do we like about Flock Beta 1?
Where to start? This first beta has a bunch of features that offer a glimpse at where we're headed:

• Photos: Sharing photos is one of the main ways people connect with their friends online, and we believe Flock delivers a rich end-to-end experience for Flickr and PhotoBucket users.
  • Uploading: Getting pictures online doesn't have to be tedious. In Flock beta 1, users can simply drag pictures onto the Photo icon to upload them, batch upload with our photo uploader, or even drag and drop pictures onto any form field on the web (we'll store the picture on your Flickr or Photobucket account, then insert the appropriate HTML snippet into the form).
  • Discovery: On any web page (such as a Typepad blog, a MySpace page...), mouse over any public picture that's hosted on Flickr or Photobucket and we'll offer to show you the entire photostream in our photo topbar. And once you're there, you can scroll through thumbnails (including nice big ones) faster then ever before. It's fast and addictive!
  • Sharing: Right click any picture to blog it. Or drag a photo thumbnail into any comment field on the web. Or drag a picture from your desktop into a comment field. Then talk about it.
  • Notification: Keep a list of your photo buddies and Flock will tell you when your friends have new pictures. We'll import your Flickr friends list and let you add anyone on Flickr or Photobucket.
• News: RSS made easy. With Flock you can preview any RSS feed, then easily add it to your RSS aggregator (we call it My News). You can then view new stories by feed, by category, or aggregated across all categories (our front page shows you today's headlines). We also tell you when you have new stories - keeping you up to date at all times.

What do we not like about Flock Beta 1?
We still have our work cut out for us:

• Our favorites backend. OK, so we got a little carried away last Fall when we threw out the old model of folders and nested folders in favor of tags, collections and storing your favorites online. The "click, share, search" part of our favorites model works quite nicely, but we know we need to support nested folders so that when you import your favorites from other browsers, they appear where you'd expect to find them.
• Making it simple, integrating it all. Making it easy isn't always so easy. We've made great strides since our last developer release, but we still have a long road ahead of us. Let's look at one example. We love the star button and the experience we're aiming for is that you say "hey, this is interesting," click on the star button, and we'll take it from there. That's easier said than done, though. For example, in Flock 0.5 clicking on the star button would automatically create a favorite for the static web page you're on, and suck in any RSS feeds into our aggregator. But more and more pages have RSS feeds, so for this release we decided to break RSS away from favorites and deal with it as part of My News. We then added in the concept of "hey, this web page has photos associated with it" and introduced the concept of "Super Star" hidden way deep under that tiny arrow on the star button. If you Super Star a page, we'll create a favorite for it, add its RSS feed to your newspaper, and add the associated photostream to your photo favorites. Did we get that 100% right just yet? Probably not, but there are no easy solutions.
• Quite a few bugs. Check out our Bugzilla repository and the release notes for Flock 0.7.

What's next?

It took us a while to get this release out the door, but we're going to push hard to get another feature-laden beta out this Fall and a polished 1.0 release towards the end of the year.

It's a journey
Building a browser ain't easy. Heck, it's taken Microsoft 5 years to add in tabs. We're one year into this. We've tried out a lot of different ideas, made a ton of mistakes and stumbled upon a couple of ideas that we think hold a lot of promise. Now that we've moved from the "open source technology" phase into "early beta consumer product," expect us to focus more of our energy on polishing the rough edges in our product and making sure transitioning to Flock (or upgrading from an older version) is smooth.

Don't expect us to stop experimenting. There's so much room for innovation in the browser space and we don't want to play it too safe. We fondly remember the days a decade or so again when every few months there was a new version of Mosaic or Netscape that enabled you to do exciting new things on the web. We want to bring that spirit and pace of innovation back.

Values
Flock is a venture capital-funded, for-profit venture. We're also a group of passionate people who believe in the power of openness, including the open source community. Here is our core belief: if we focus relentlessly on offering our users tools that let them take control over their online activities and if we engage in a conversation about how we can best improve our products, then we will build exciting products and do well as a company. Read more about our core values.

Company update
Along with working on the product, we've also built out the company over the past six months. Here are some of the highlights on that front:

• We've raised enough money to allow us to see the company through our next milestone. Our new board member is Tod Francis of Shasta Ventures. Tod joins existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures, and angel investors including, among others, Joe Kraus, Josh Kopelman, Gil Penchina, Scott Kurnit, Michael Tanne and Stratton Sclavos.
• Our team has grown to about 25 people, including Mark Towfiq, our VP of Engineering and Product Development, and Brian Osborn, our VP of Marketing. Mark previously headed engineering at Walmart.com and NexTag. Brian most recently worked in marketing at eBay and PayPal.
• We've partnered with Yahoo! as our default partner for search, photos (Flickr) and shared bookmarks (del.icio.us). We're especially delighted about our partnership with Yahoo! in view of the company's heavy focus on the social web. Yahoo! is also a leader in opening up APIs to their services, allowing us to bring search results, photos and Yahoo! News headlines to our users faster then ever before.

Thanks for keeping an eye on us as we continue on our journey - let us know what you think!