Flock, the social web browser that fell victim to Web 2.0 hype in 2005, appears to be finally taking flight four years later, with a new release that swoops on the surge in social media usage.

Flock 2.5, released today, amounts to the popular Firefox browser on social-media steroids. “This is our biggest release since the commercial deployment of 1.0 [in 2007],” Shawn Hardin, chief executive, told me during a demo of the product.

Flock attracted considerable buzz when it first launched in October 2005, a time when Web 2.0 fever had gripped San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

But the start-up had a not-ready-for-primetime developer version of its product back then.  Much of the interest had dissipated when, after months of silence, Flock finally produced a beta version in June 2006.

Things finally started to take off with version 1.0 in November 2007 and the growth of Facebook and Twitter over the past two years has made Flock far more relevant to users.

Mr Hardin reports 7.5m downloads of the browser to date, over 85 per cent growth this year in Facebook users adopting Flock and 80m service accounts being logged into to date, across the 23 social media services integrated into Flock.

“We are to a certain extent slipstreaming on the globalisation of social activity as MySpace and Facebook and now Twitter have seen explosive growth,” added Dan Burkhart, head of marketing. “It’s a global phenomenon - we are seeing users come from more than 192 countries.”

Flock 2.5 takes the latest release of Firefox and adds a social media sidebar and a multimedia bar across the top. These decrease the space for displaying web pages, but they work well on a widescreen monitor and can also be easily dismissed.

They may also be preferable to something like Tweetdeck - an application monitoring Twitter and Facebook, whose columns can take up a whole screen.

Flock’s People sidebar contains activity from all of a user’s social networks, while the media bar on top shows photos and videos from services such as YouTube and Flickr. A search box has a drop-down interface which shows many different options and sources for search terms.

The 2.5 release focuses on tighter Twitter and Facebook integration and adds the Bebo social network, but still finds no place for Friendfeed.

Facebook instant messaging is now available, without users having to be on the Facebook site. Photos and links can be dragged and dropped into the chats. In addition, Tweets, external blog posts and photos can be “Flockcasted” easily into Facebook.

Objects can also be dragged and dropped into Twitter and searches can be saved and be automatically updated.

Flock seems to be on a stronger financial footing. It staged a $15m funding round a year ago, adding Fidelity Ventures as an investor. Mr Hardin said this should be enough to see the company through to profitability.

Like Firefox’s Mozilla, it makes money through the search bar, taking a cut of clicked-on ads surrounding the results it produces. But it hopes to produce more revenues from its sidebar and drop-down bars. For example, one shows information and logins for webmail services. Someone clicking on a link to upgrade to Yahoo Mail Plus would earn money for Flock.

“There is a myriad of ways for us to expand and diversify revenues beyond search,” said Mr Hardin

Tags: firefox, Flock, mozilla

May 19, 2009 5:01am in Digital media, Internet, Software | Comment