There is no question that the social web has quickly become a global phenomenon, spanning all languages, cultures and geographies. Flock has been distributed in 18 different languages, spanning the globe, but until today we have not offered a Pan-Latin Spanish version. As we had alluded to last week, we are delighted to announce that Flock has teamed up with Univision, the largest and most popular Spanish-language media company to exclusively distribute both an English and Spanish-language version of the Univision Edition of Flock. Univision will help introduce Flock to the large, and rapidly growing Hispanic community online.
Of the 22 Million Hispanics who are online today, 40% frequently spend time on social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. With the Univision Edition of Flock, this vibrant and fast-growing community can now remain connected to their friends, their favorite social networks, and stay up to date with the best Spanish content available from Univision.
Here at Flock, we’re thrilled to have partnered with the enthusiastic team at Univision, and couldn’t be happier about the excitement with which they’ve proudly introduced Flock to their loyal audience of users. We’d also like to extend a very warm welcome to the Hispanic community online, and hope that the Univision Edition of Flock makes your web experience much more personal and gratifying than it has been with conventional browsers.
If you’re interested in seeing Flock explained in Spanish check out this video:
If you speak Spanish, please give it a try by downloading it at flock.univision.com. We look forward to hearing your impressions.
I am excited to announce that Flock will now be promoted and distributed by two major online partners to open up the world of Flock to more users around the globe.
The first partnership, which is launching today, is in Europe with Onet.pl, the leading portal in Poland with a monthly reach of over 12.4 Million Polish users. Onet.pl is a media powerhouse with a network of over 1.5 MM active blogs, serving a European audience well beyond Poland. The Onet Edition of Flock will be made available at flock.onet.pl as well as on our own site as the exclusive Polish language version of Flock available at www.flock.com/versions. The Onet version of Flock offers a deep custom integration into Onet’s social network (Ludzie), webmail, blog and photo sharing services. We’re proud to have partnered with such a well-respected media partner in Europe, and look forward to hearing from many new Flock enthusiasts from Poland and across Europe.
We have a second major media partner we’ll be making a public announcement about within the next three weeks. It is another market leader serving millions of users within the U.S. and across several large international markets.
We’re delighted to be partnered with these two leading web portals to deliver a unique web experience to their respective audiences through the lens of the Flock social web browser. To date, the Flock audience has grown almost entirely by word of mouth -- thanks to our enthusiastic and supportive users -- we couldn’t be happier to work with these incredible partners and open up the world of Flock to an even broader global audience.
At Flock, we love to hear from you. We want to make sure that Flock continues to help you discover, enjoy and share the relationships and content you’re passionate about. So while you’ve been talking, we’ve been listening. The result is a new version of Flock that reflects the new ways you want to use your favorite social browser along with two of your favorite networks—Twitter and Facebook.
The new version that we’re releasing today lets you keep your finger on the pulse of your social networks, yet it gives you the freedom to explore online without having to click back and forth between websites, tabs, applications and content. And now, Flock is the only browser that let’s you take Facebook Chat with you wherever you go on the Web. You can also drag and drop photos, videos, links and text into your chats, making everything simple, social and fun.
Flock 2.5 makes sharing and discovering content fast and easy. You just drag and drop URLs, photos, videos, text or other things you find on the web to a friend’s Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or other profile in Flock’s People Sidebar and it’s instantly shared. And now Flock comes with Twitter Search right in MyWorld, so you can keep up to date on all the topics you’re most interested in and save them in the best place possible, your Flock browser.
Last but not least is FlockCast, an effortless way to share information across your social networks. With FlockCast, you can broadcast anything from blog posts and picture uploads to Tweets and MySpace status updates directly to your Facebook profile. And when you share a URL in a Twitter message, Flock automatically shortens the URL.
Clearly, this new version of Flock is for those of you that are Twitter and Facebook fans. Our Facebook users have grown over 80% since the beginning of 2009! And, on Twitter, we are proud and appreciative of in the great things you’re writing about Flock across the Twittersphere… (check out #flock).
Flock’s popularity has been almost entirely driven by the generous recommendations coming from each of you (we just passed 7.5 million downloads). We’re extremely grateful for your support and hope that you’ll keep spreading the word. And now we’re giving you the opportunity to earn the recognition and rewards you deserve by telling your friends about Flock on Facebook at http://www.flock.com/refer.
As always, let us know about your experiences with Flock. What you have to say is important--and we hear you.
While we often think of social media as a way to connect with our broad circle of friends, its influence has gone beyond the bounds of entertainment and communication to truly democratize information and to transform “readers” and “consumers” into publishers. Flock celebrates the diversity of human self-expression by making it simple to participate, publish and “write to the web” from your browser.
On May 4th and 5th, leading human rights advocates, journalists, and scientists will convene at The Soul of the New Machine conference being held on the U.C. Berkeley campus. The conference will look at how technology can empower human rights around the world. Conference participants will explore how new developments in science and technology can be applied to human rights evidence gathering and analysis, advocacy, and outreach. The conference participants will learn about the latest advancements in mobile technologies and new media and how these systems have already been applied to expose war crimes and other serious violations of human rights and to disseminate this information in real time throughout the world.
Flock is a proud sponsor of this event. Flock’s users reside in 192 countries and territories around the world. This diverse global community has collectively engaged in more than 400,000,000 social actions including blog posts, uploaded photos, shared images, video and information content along with a myriad of communications and people connections.
How can Flock help empower human rights? By helping our users to document their reality, expose their truth, advocate change and raise their voice! The team at Flock salutes its users who are active all around the world shaping their online experience and their community every day. We want to learn about your personal story. Let us know how Flock empowers your social action for social good. Please email your story to makingadifference at flock dot com.
If you’d like to learn more about getting involved and/or attending The Soul of the New Machine conference, go to www.newmachineconference.org. Those who are not able to attend in person can watch live video streaming and blogging of conference events on the conference site starting May 4th.
Knowledge and awareness are the important first steps in this journey. We hope you’ll join us.
2008 was a great year for Flock. We launched Flock 2.0, added integration with MySpace, Digg and WebMail, secured new funding and received numerous awards. And we reached an important milestone: Flock has been downloaded over 6 million times. While our technical accomplishments, partnerships and kudos from bloggers and the press mean a great deal to us, the most gratifying accomplishments of the year came from you, the people that use Flock every day.
Together you‘ve made over 41 million log-ins across applications like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. You’ve accessed nearly seven million photos and videos using the Media Bar and 25 million feeds via the Feeds Sidebar. You’ve stayed in touch with your friends by collectively loading more than 150 million people each and every month into the People Sidebar! And you’ve made almost one million blog posts using Flock. What you value inspires our direction and you’ve rewarded us by using Flock in record numbers. And by telling your friends about Flock. Your recommendations have been invaluable and, by our estimates, have contributed to more than 90% of our growth in 2008! You continue to show us that we’re on the right track.
We know what is driving your use of Flock. Your life isn’t slowing down. You’re engaged and more social than ever before. You want to know what’s going on and there’s a lot you want to share. You’ve got more friends and you want to make sure you don’t miss a thing. And sometimes that can be a bit much. No worries. That’s how we’ll continue to help, by making it easier for you to stay connected, but never tethered or walled in.
With a new year comes new opportunity and the entire Flock team is off and running to make 2009 great. We’ll continue to go where your needs take us, and we’ll do it by maintaining our commitment to innovation. While ‘traditional’ values like quality are important to us, Flock isn’t like your parents’ browser. At Flock we have a new world view of the browser and it’s all about you.
We’ll continue to innovate and find better ways to help you connect with the people, information and things you care about. But you’re the best source of inspiration for Flock, so keep visiting the site and letting us know what you think and what you need. After all, at Flock it will always be all about you.
Less than a year after the initial release of Flock 1.0, we are proud to release Flock 2.0. Flock 2.0 has been through three beta cycles, enjoyed tremendous feedback from our community of users and is a significant step forward in capability and quality. And, this final release of Flock 2.0 has some great new capabilities that have not been made available in any prior 2.0 beta release. Let me take a moment to tell you what to expect in Flock 2.0.
Flock 2.0 is built on the latest Firefox 3 technology from Mozilla, so you’ll find it to be snappy, safe and easier to use. Flock 2.0 also comes with some great new features not found in any other browser today.
First of all, we’re very pleased to announce that we’ve added MySpace as a major new addition to our suite of 23 other popular services integrated within Flock. MySpace was the #1 most requested service from our community. Now MySpace lovers can stay up to date with their MySpace friends and activities no matter where they are on the web. MySpace users will also find that Flock offers the easiest way to upload photos, insert photos and videos in MySpace comment fields and share most any web content by simply dragging and dropping it into the Flock People sidebar.
Flock 2 also incorporates Media RSS (MRSS) detection capability so that you can subscribe to media streams being made available by websites, even if the site isn’t one of the 23 integrated with Flock. Once you’ve subscribed to a media stream via Media RSS, you will be notified about the arrival of new photos and videos posted by your favorite sites and they will flow right into your MyWorld page in Flock, so you never miss out on updates to your favorite media streams. We’ll go into this great new capability in depth in a later blog post.
For the first time, we are also making themes available for Flock 2. Check out extensions.flock.com and install a theme to customize the look of Flock. We’re shipping today with two new themes, and will be adding many more over the coming weeks and months.
If you’re already a Flock user – thank you! And, get ready for the best version of Flock ever! If you are new to Flock, give Flock 2.0 a test drive and discover what users from 165 countries and territories all around the world already know – with Flock you will rock the web! With the latest Firefox 3 architecture under the hood, you’ve now got the latest technology with the most innovative features available in any browser today. If you’ve been using the 2.0 beta, we highly recommend you upgrade…there’s a lot in this release that you haven’t seen yet.
Check it out and let us know what you think. Your feedback has been essential in developing Flock 2, and we have been growing with the strong global support of satisfied Flockstars everywhere who have been telling their friends: “get ready to meet your new favorite browser”.
-Cheers
Shawn Hardin, Chief Flockstar
shawn at Flock dot com
Since the launch of Flock’s v1 product, we’ve taken great pride in receiving positive notes from our community about how Flock has “changed the way that [they] experience the Web”. Flock provides the technology, and people bring their widely varied interests and add their friends to the mix to create an experience that is entirely tailored to suit their needs.
We’ve recently embarked on an exciting project to create some new “editions” of Flock, which will appeal to people that share strong passions for particular causes and topics. We are launching our maiden “edition” today: the “Eco-Edition” of the Flock browser, which delivers the best environmentally conscious “green” content and media available from around the web in a tightly organized format, all available from a single download. Once the browser installs, it updates with fresh eco-content daily in the form of news feeds, media streams, and favorite sites, delivering an experience that is dynamic, connected and always fresh. We’ve included an extensive offering of content topics, and fully expect people to prune and further refine the experience to better serve their own preferences once they’ve gotten acquainted with Flock.
Flock provides a unique platform for browser-based content programming -- users bring their passion for topics of interest. With the “Eco-Edition”, environmental information ranges from “alternative energy” to “climate news” to “green design + architecture” to “green cuisine”. Creating awareness is the best way to effect change, and we’re glad to help by donating 10% of proceeds from the Eco-Edition to an environmental charity, as determined by all the users of the Eco-Edition at the end of 2008.
We’re hitting record growth numbers for new downloads and users every week, and have been thrilled by the many vocal advocates of Flock. We are targeting Flock’s next product release, v1.2, for launch in May and have some exciting new services integrated which we know you’re going to enjoy, because your requests guide our feature prioritization.
We will also release new editions for other passionate audiences over the months to come. We hope these editions will introduce Flock’s unique capabilities to new audiences that will be delighted by what they discover in Flock and join the global community of raving Flock fans.
We’re excited to see what happens when we mix Flock, People and Passion together. And we’re thrilled to kick off this new program with the “Eco-Edition”.
As always, we are very much looking forward to your input and feedback.
It is my sincere pleasure to announce the release of Flock version 1.0. The Social Web Browser is now available to download from www.flock.com. This event marks a significant milestone for our company. When I arrived at Flock one year ago, the primary goal I set for the company was to transform us from a great idea company into a world-class innovation and execution company. Since that time, the tremendous work from all across Flock’s expanding organization has demonstrated this team’s appetite and capability to do exactly that: we upgraded the underlying technology platform for Flock with version 0.8 in Q1 of this year, we enhanced significantly the dependability, discoverability and feature integration with version 0.9 in Q2, we released over two hundred bug fixes and feature enhancements with version 0.9.1 in Q3, and today we are launching the full release of Flock 1.0, with the integration of “people in the browser”, available as a free download for Mac, PC and Linux.
The 1.0 Social Web Browser incorporates all your friends across numerous popular social services (Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter). We hear from our 1.0 beta users every day that this product has changed the way they are engaging with and experiencing the Web. The most frequently used adjective describing this version of Flock is ‘addictive’. We take that as a real compliment, and a strong vote that Flock is onto something very special.
Flock 1.0 is also a platform, and you will see an expansion of the social and media services with which Flock is integrated early in the New Year, along with the formal release of our 1.0 API for developers and third parties around the world to leverage, add services and further contribute to Flock’s capabilities.
With your help, and the millions of new users we plan to serve in the year ahead, we will continue to be champions of open-standards, and strive to continually deliver unique and meaningful experiences that place the user at the center of everything, and are made possible only from within the browser. We’re incredibly excited by the launch of Flock 1.0. The Flock team is both grateful and enormously proud of the overwhelmingly positive response to our 1.0 release, and I want to personally thank all of the passionate community members and Flock users who have emailed enthusiastic notes of encouragement. Your tremendous feedback fuels our desire to push the boundaries of browser innovation. We have great ambitions to continually improve and evolve Flock, and hope that we can continue to count on your passionate engagement to help us guide our course.
I welcome your comments and feedback – either here or via email (shawn at flock.com).
Posted September 17, 2007 - 1:49pm by Shawn Hardin
Previously under wraps for TechCrunch40, we are now able to show you a preview of this exciting next stage of our product. You can read our Press Release about the unveiling of Flock 1.0 at TechCrunch40 here.
Want to get your hands on it? Visit www.flock.com/privatebeta to get a sneak peek of the new features and sign up for a private beta that we will be launching in the coming weeks. Be one of the first to see and test drive the revolutionary next step of Flock!
Posted September 17, 2007 - 8:46am by Shawn Hardin
It is my great pleasure to announce that Flock has been selected as one of the 40 hottest startup companies by TechCrunch40 (out of over 700, from more than 26 countries around the world). The event is being held today and tomorrow in San Francisco and Flock will be in attendance to do our first public demonstration of Flock 1.0, The Social Web Browser.
Check back later today, when we will have lots of additional information to share with you...
Flock has been distributed in 18 different languages, spanning the globe, but until today we have not offered a Pan-Latin Spanish version. As we had 
The first partnership, which is launching today, is in Europe with Onet.pl, the leading portal in Poland with a monthly reach of over 12.4 Million Polish users. Onet.pl is a media powerhouse with a network of over 1.5 MM active blogs, serving a European audience well beyond Poland. The Onet Edition of Flock will be made available at 
