Flock is a Joke.

Posted by jonathan at 8:14am EST on 03/03/2009

Flock is a browser that tried to take off. They tried to do something that no one else was doing, nor should they be doing. Flock has tried time and time again to gain market share in the social networking space. Flock is built on Firefox, or at least it was.

TechCrunch reports that Flock is moving from Firefox to Googles Chrome. Sigh.

Flock is built around social networking and that is where they make their money; advertising, advertising, advertising.

Flock was a failure from the beginning. Even the idea of flock is a failure. I’m sure Shawn Hardin, the CEO of Flock, thought he had a great idea, but to be honest, it’s not. There are some things that aren’t being done because they shouldn’t ever be done. Social networking in a browser is one of those things.

Flock had US$30 million invested by VC, but wow, that was a stupid move. I rarely will say a VC investment is a bad investment from the get-go, but this really was a bad investment.

Flock never has or will have a future in the browser space. Taking something that is open source and wide spread like Chrome or Firefox, then trying to make money it will simply not work.

As a comparison, Flock is like taking WordPress MU and building your own WordPress network for users to sign up and pay for upgrades. Why on earth would I go to anyone else for a site than to the people that wrote the software?

If I want uber social networking tools, I’ll simply add them in using an extension. It’s as simple as that.

UPDATE FROM THE COMMENTS: “Starting from scratch? Sorry, but most of flock is JavaScript. Those parts are easy to port over. You overestimate the complexity,” says Jesse Andrews, who used to work at Flock over a year ago.

Commentary: This is very similar to what I was talking about above, about how Flock is mostly just social networking add-ons. It’s not a lot of grunt work to do what they are doing.

From the get-go of Flock, I felt it was a rip off of Firefox and they were trying to brand their own browser. But in reality, Flock really isn’t that great and never has been.