If you haven’t heard about Flock yet, check out this Wired story and our profile of Flock from August 26, 2005.
It is still in private beta, although you can request a beta invitation on their home page. Not sure of your chances though.
Chris Messina sent out an email to Flock beta testers yesterday announcing that they are moving from beta 0.2 to 0.5 and making some product changes.
Social Bookmarks (they call it “Breadcrumbs”) are being phased out after a lukewarm response from testers, and they will be adding new functionality. They’ve also announced that Flock will be publicly available sometime in October:
We’re going to be phasing out our online breadcrumb service and replacing it with a couple more… established options. Oh, and don’t worry, we’ll make sure you can take your existing breadcrumbs with you. So in the meantime, keep posting to our service, but know that we’ll be shutting its doors come November 1. Questions? Just let us know.
So back to the next release. Let me first say that we’re all very excited about the ideas we’re baking into Flock 0.5. Second, we’re set to launch something public in October! So between this Friday
and then, we’re going to need lots of intrepid testers to pound on our stuff and let us know what works, what’s broken, what you like and what you can’t stand.
I must say I’m even more impressed with Flock - it is a very bold move to simply drop functionality that must have hundreds of developer hours behind it. They are obviously serious about listening to beta feedback and building an exceptional product.
Chris also pointed to flickr pictures of the flock office and people taken by Flocker Lloyd Budd.
Hey Michael,
Thanks for your posts — they’ve definitely been very helpful in getting the word out about what we’re doing and and the response has been phenomenal!
A point of clarification on your post. You write:
In truth, we’re only phasing out the Flock web service — not at all ditching the concept of social bookmarks! At Flock, we decided that we should be focusing 100% on the browser and let partners take care of the online services part. Nor did this decision come about because of a “lukewarm” response from our testers. It just didn’t make sense to continue to invest more time in a web service when there are already folks working on this problem full time and have much larger, more established communities.
Oh, and one more thing. We put our entire web service together in a matter of four days — soup to nuts — writing in Rails. I wish we had 100s of developer hours to spend on it, but alas, making a browser is tough work!
Chris, good clarifications. Yes, Rails is cool, but I didn’t realize that it was that cool.
Chris, you mentioned about “partners”.
Is there any more info about that?
You could always drop us a line.