Today, the European Commission arrived at an important settlement with Microsoft regarding the manner in which Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser is presented as a default browsing option to consumers who are using Windows-based PC’s. The Commission has recognized not only that web browsers are extremely important in defining the overall experience for web users, but that this is also critical place to take action in order to promote choice and innovation on behalf of consumers so that open standards and innovation can flourish everywhere on the web.
Microsoft and the European Commission have agreed on Microsoft’s proposal to present a “Browser Choice Screen” to users with a choice of 12 browsers, based on popularity as determined by market share within the European Union. Flock was included as one of the 12 browsers, and this means that 100 Million Windows users will receive a window notifying them of their choice in innovative offerings other than Internet Explorer.
This is a big win for consumers.
Most people have surely made their choice in browsers without understanding the full range of offerings available. Above all, the Social Web continues to grow throughout the world, (Facebook added 250 Million users this year, topping 350MM, and Twitter continues to ignite passionate people from every corner of the globe) Flock’s specific focus on delivering a browser that is designed to better serve the needs of people who are not just consumers, but also active participants in social behaviors on the web; from publishing blogs, to updating profiles, to tweeting, to discovering media and staying better informed from all their own sources of interest…all from within the comfort of their own browser.
Flock is delighted about the spirit of the Choice Screen, and very excited to be selected as one of the browsers that will be presented to the broader European community. We are hopeful that many more people around the world will agree that the web has evolved far beyond the capabilities of conventional web browsers, and that Flock is the best solution for people who want to stay up to date with a variety of people, content and media as every day evolves quickly.
This is a fun follow-up post to our note we published on October 4th, when we had just recently crossed 2 Million total users on Facebook. Well, in just two and a half months, we’ve added another Million users of Flock on Facebook.
In the chart below you can see that we’ve been on a nice trajectory this year, and in particular we’ve seen exceptional growth occurring around the globe from those countries where Facebook and Twitter have also been growing at record pace. These are the kind of charts we all like to see, but our challenge is to keep it going. That’s where you come in.
If you're one of the many enjoying your Flock experience, please take advantage of our Flock Referral program by inviting your friends via Facebook to help them discover that Flock is the best browser for social web users.
We’re delighted with this recent growth and validation from millions of people. We’re also looking forward to 2010 with a great deal of hope and anticipation because we’ve been working on a new Flock experience that we believe is going to blow you away. We’ll start sharing more about the next version of Flock in the New Year.
For those that are interested in receiving an early peek at the beta, please submit your email to our list below so that we can send you your invite as it becomes available. (We don’t sell or share your contact information with anyone. We’re on the same team.)
Dan Burkhart
Vice President of Marketing
Dan at flock dot com
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.
It’s been a tremendous year for Flock so far. We just hit a really nice milestone that we’d like to share with everyone. Flock just exceeded 2 million total users on Facebook. Of total Flock users, those who are active on Facebook have grown 280% in the first three quarters of 2009. We are honored to have this many people from around the world electing to make the switch to experience the social web with Flock as their browser of choice.
We appreciate Facebook, and all of its loyal fans worldwide for helping spread the word about Flock. Flock is an independent effort, and as such we are even more critically dependent on our fans to spread the word about the Flock browser. We are humbled and honored by this vote of confidence and look forward to evolving the Flock product to continually improve the web experience for our fans.
We have listened and learned from you – our invaluable community of users. And our team is busy building and is incredibly excited about delivering an even greater experience for our users in our next version of Flock 3.0, which is scheduled for release in Q1 2010. Flock 3.0 will first be made available early next year as a private beta to those users of our current release. More to come soon on this incredibly exciting project.
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.
I'm super excited to announce a brand new tool for all of you passionate Flockstars out there!
Top Flockstars is a way for you to get recognized and rewarded for your hard work telling the world how much you love Flock.
We thrive on the word-of-mouth evangelism that you all generate. The majority of our 7.5 million downloads have been generated by you telling your friends, family, and colleagues about Flock. You love Flock, you tell your friends, and therefore we are able to keep making Flock better for you. We're immensely grateful for this gift you give us, and we wanted to give something back to you.
It's pretty simple:
1. Log into Top Flockstars using your Facebook account - we'll show you which of your friends are already using Flock
2. Use our form to tell your non-Flocking friends to download Flock
3. For each person who downloads Flock and logs into Facebook, you'll get a token
4. Spend your tokens on nifty rewards!
If you're super-persuasive with your friends, you'll get visibility on the Top Flockstars leaderboard (I'm looking forward to watching the competition). You can also compete on a smaller scale with the friends leaderboard, which shows you how you're doing against your own Facebook friends. And, of course, you get the joy of knowing you've turned your friends on to an awesome browser.
This program is made possible through the power of Facebook Connect. Instead of requiring you to sign up for a new account to participate, all you need are your Facebook credentials. Simple. We're pretty sure that Top Flockstars is the first program to use Facebook Connect in this way, and psyched to break new ground by creating another interesting way to get the most out of Facebook and Flock working together.
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.
Earlier this year, Flock announced a specialized Eco-Edition of our browser geared towards those interested in environmental topics ranging from climate change to alternative energy, from hybrid vehicles to green design and green cuisine. As part of this release, we pledged that 10% of the proceeds generated from searches conducted in Flock’s Eco-Edition would be donated back to the environmental organization deemed most popular and fitting by the community of Eco-Edition users.
The Eco-Edition had a fantastic run, and was promoted by key partners such as TreeHugger, Grist, PlanetGreen, Ecorazzi, GroovyGreen and AllTop. We’re very appreciative for the great demonstration of support by all of these companies, and are pleased to announce the award of 10% of Flock’s Eco-Edition proceeds have been delivered to the Environmental Defense Fund (www.edf.org), by the choice of Flock Eco-Edition users.
Interestingly, people using Flock’s Eco-Edition conducted 80% more searches per user as compared to Flock’s overall population of users. This is a great testament to the fact that people can and will change their behavior when they believe that their actions will have an immediate and direct benefit to the world around them. For this, we’re grateful and honored to give to the E.D.F. and be part of initiating this great experiment.
Flock will not be able to continue supporting an Eco-specific Edition going forward, but we encourage everyone to customize their own versions of Flock to best suit their own unique assemblage of Feeds, Bookmarks, Friends and Media Streams to keep them informed about their own view of the dynamic world we live in.
Many Thanks,
Dan Burkhart
Vice President, Marketing and Business Development
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.
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 
The majority of our 7.5 million downloads have been generated by 
