Marc Andreessen is backing a new browser company called RockMelt. Not much is known about RockMelt other than it is being designed by an all-star team (including software engineer Robert John Churchill from the Netscape days) and that it is tied into Facebook through Facebook Connect. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has a screenshot of the sign-in page and speculates that RockMelt is in fact a Facebook browser. Miguel Helft at the NYT leans in that direction as well.  It kind of makes sense since Andreesen is on the board of Facebook, but I suspect it is only half the story.

A Facebook browser, however, is a good metaphor for thinking about how browsers, in general, need to change.  What would a Facebook browser look like? Well, to start with, you would be able to see updates from your friends on Facebook, share your own updates and media right from the browser, and perhaps IM with your friends through Facebook chat. While those set of features would be convenient, they are nothing revolutionary. Flock, which calls itself the social browser, already incorporates Facebook Connect (and Twitter and other social networks to boot), but it hasn’t taken off. And Facebook itself offers a toolbar for Firefox that lets you see notifications, search Facebook, and share links. There are plenty of other Firefox add-ons which incorporate Facebook features as well.

But the Facebook connection may just be the starting point for a much more ambitious piece of software. Andreesen said as much to the NYT in an interview earlier this year, which Helft quotes from in his article:

Mr. Andreessen suggested the new browser would be different, saying that most other browsers had not kept pace with the evolution of the Web, which had grown from an array of static Web pages into a network of complex Web sites and applications. “There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch,” Mr. Andreessen said.

What sorts of things is he talking about? Making the browser social appears to be at the top of the list. The first thing you do is connect to Facebook. But that could just be a building block for a social browser that handles Web apps in an entirely new way. The browser was built around the Web page metaphor, but increasingly the most interesting things happening on the Web do not necessarily exist on any one Web page. They exist in real time data streams (such as Facebook’s portable News Feed and Twitter) and in richer Webtop applications. A modern browser should be designed not only to surf the Web, but to manage your information streams and Web apps all in a seamless user interface.

Whether or not RockMelt is tackling this broader challenge, I don’t know. But I hope it is because we need to move the ball forward with a radical, yet accessible, new approach. Radical, yet accessible—that is the challenge. It must be radical enough to open up new, more efficient, avenues of information discovery, creation, and interaction. It must be a communications platform as well as a browsing platform.

The original browser model was one of consumption, of reading Web pages as if they were documents. Despite all the progress of the past decade, we are still stuck with that legacy to a large degree because it is built into our browsers. So what would a true social browser look like? Below is my own wish list of features (some of these are available as add-ons or in existing desktop clients, but there is an opportunity to unify them in one seamless experience):

• It would have multiple modes for browsing, search, following social data stream, and launching Web applications
• The home page would be a stream reader which brings together real time streams from across the Web (which Facebook now has with Friendfeed).
• IM, email, and public messages (status updates and Tweets) would be always accessible in the toolbar or a sidebar
• It would support a variety of Web apps which could be launched seamlessly within the browser without going to a Website and logging in.
• One-button access to sharing services of your choice (Flickr, Posterous, Youtube, Wordpress)
• Real-time search and alerts from across the Web (social stream, news, finance sites, sports sites, etc.)
• Support for Google Gears to give the browser offline capabilities as well as local caching and a light database for computing tasks

That’s just off the top of my head.  If you were redesigning the browser from scratch today, what would it look like?

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Flock first launched in October 2005 and has had 6 million or so downloads. But it still has less market share than even Netscape, which was discontinued over a year ago.

In the past Flock has said all it needs is a few tens of millions of users to score big dollars from the search engines (each active user generates $5 or so in search engine revenue). But after three years of trying, Flock hasn’t been able to achieve more than a fraction of that number of users.

As to why Flock is leaving Mozilla: sources say that they’ve become frustrated with Mozilla’s lack of attention to Flock’s needs. One source says Flock felt like the “red headed step child of the Mozilla development community.” Sources are also saying that Flock feels that Google Chrome is far easier to work with than Firefox.

One problem is that Chrome isn’t yet cross-platform and works only on Windows machines. But Google is actively working on Mac and Linux versions of Chrome and should release them in the next few months. Right about the time the next version of Flock is released.

Flock hasn’t yet returned a request for comment on this story.

Update: Flock CEO Shawn Hardin responds in the comments:

Mike,

I was responding to your email from only a few hours ago when I saw your article. It’s important to clarify a couple of things. We haven’t ceased development efforts on the Mozilla platform. Our upcoming release of Flock 2.1 is built on the Mozilla platform. Having said that, the browser space is heating up, and we’ve seen a variety of exciting technologies emerge over the last several months that are appealing.

We always have and will continue to make architectural decisions that balance what’s best for our users and what’s best for Flock as a business. This has resulted in a healthy, growing user base and business for Flock, and we expect this to continue in 2009. In fact, with over seven million downloads almost entirely from word of mouth, Flock enjoys a highly satisfied user base with consistently over 92% customer satisfaction, very strong net promoter scores, and an average of four hours of usage per day.

With a continuing focus on user-centered browser innovation, our team is in active research and development on a range of exciting new enhancements to Flock. It is still far too early to comment on anything specific, but we are very excited about this design phase…

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Design philosophies could hardly be further apart. Google’s ironically named Chrome browser, which launched last month, advanced the notion that browsers ought to be neither seen nor heard. Like operating systems, they should sit obediently in the background and make sure that the applications on top of them run quickly, reliably and safely.

Flock has always taken the opposite approach, insisting that the browser should provide a lot of upfront functionality on its own, not fade out of sight. Tonight’s release of Flock 2.0 – which brings the Mozilla-based browser up-to-speed with Firefox 3 technology and adds new support for MySpace and media RSS – reasserts this notion by giving the browser an even higher level of visibility than before.

Flock 2.0 is the first browser to take advantage of media RSS, a standard developed by Yahoo that syndicates rich content like photos and videos much like regular RSS syndicates blog posts. Now Flock users can add media RSS feeds to their My World start pages from any website that provides them, such as 12seconds.tv and Qik. VP of Marketing and Business Development Dan Burkhart describes media RSS as the quickest way for small to medium sized startups to integrate with Flock.

MySpace has also been finally integrated into Flock, allowing users to see their MySpace contacts in a sidebar where they can easily message them and share the content they find while surfing the web. Perhaps most usefully, Flock users can now comment on friends’ profiles using videos and photos without needing to know any HTML code. The developers at Flock have been working closely with MySpace to get all of this set up, and they’ve leveraged the Data Availability platform to do so.

Lastly, and most importantly, Flock’s code base has been upgraded to match that of Firefox 3. While most of the improvements are under the hood and include things such as better memory management, you’ll notice certain distinguishing Firefox 3 features such as the Awesome Bar. Burkhart says that the upgrade to Firefox 3 code was non-trivial and took about 3 months of focused attention.

What’s not in this release? Instant messaging is notably absent, although Burkhart says it’s definitely in the works and will support the most commonly used IM protocols. No word yet on when it will launch but it sounds like Flock’s most important feature at this time, especially now that MySpace support has been released.

Flock has been downloaded over six million times since the company’s founding 3 years ago and the first version’s launch last Fall. The browser is marketed primarily toward those in the 18-34 year old demographic that use social websites heavily.

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Flock, the so-called “social browser” built on top of Mozilla technology, has raised $15 million in a Series D round led by Fidelity Ventures and joined by Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures, and Shasta Ventures.

The round (the company’s biggest) more than doubles its total to over $28 million, an amount that has been gradually raised over the past three years even though Flock 1.0 launched only this past November.

CEO Shawn Hardin speaks about Flock’s mission in very sweeping terms: enabling users to express themselves, participate in online communities, have voices, and engage their peers. As he sees it, the web is experiencing a paradigm shift from consumption to participation, and it needs a new type of browser to go along with that shift.

Flock is basically a suite of browser extensions with ties into web services like Facebook and Twitter. A personalized homepage called MyWorld and a special sidebar serve as feed readers and friend update aggregators. You’re given quick access to Gmail and Yahoo webmail accounts and any blogs that you administer. And a media bar along the top makes for quick searching on Flickr, YouTube, and other social media sites.

When asked whether regular browser extensions pose much competition for Flock, Hardin suggests that very few people actually enjoy personalizing things enough to set up the breadth of functionality provided by Flock. Plus, Flock already has a proven revenue model where these do not; it earns money the same way Mozilla does, through search placement deals with the engines (Yahoo and a few others in Flock’s case).

Almost 4 million people have downloaded Flock, and users are said to use it for over 4 hours per day on average.

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Today, however, they split their endorsement. In a blog post titled “Netscape Recommends Flock, Too,” Netscape’s Richard Klein describes Flock as “Firefox with social integration” and gives it his thumbs up.

The only problem is that Netscape has next to no actual users left to make these recommendations to – less than 1% market share. Flock must love the endorsement, but it isn’t going to make much of an impact on actual downloads.

We’re fans of Flock here, too (Duncan gushes, whereas I think its excellent but very slow sometimes). Personally, I’m finding Firefox 3 for the Mac the best, fastest and most stable browser I’ve ever used.

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Some reports have suggested that many of the Flock tweaks to the underlying Firefox engine were designed specifically to provide a more stable browsing experience; in the couple of weeks I’ve been using it, Flock hasn’t crashed once, where as I had grown so sick of Firefox crashing I had switched to using Safari. If you’re having stability issues with Firefox it’s worth a look…the social networking features are good as well

See our Flock 1.0 review here, and a video demo of Flock 1.0 at TechCrunch40 here.

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The new version of Flock, the first full release was first demonstrated at the TechCrunch 40 conference in September. The new version builds on previous Flock versions by offering a variety of social networking tie-ins.

I’ve been hard on Flock in the past, believing it to be nothing more than Firefox with a couple of fancy plugins. In some respects that was true (it’s based on Firefox code) but the new Flock offers something completely unique that for me at least makes it surprisingly very good.

Facebook Comes To The Sidebar

The big change to Flock is the introduction of sidebar social networking integration. Flock now comes standard with support for Facebook, Flickr (more so than previously), Twitter and YouTube.

Facebook addicts will love the new Flock. Sidebar Facebook access is not dissimilar to the Facebook iPhone interface, but with better options including the ability to upload photos directly to Facebook. Some options do take you directly to Facebook itself, but it’s still very handy having them at your command in an easy to use sidebar.

The Twitter app does a reasonable job and is not unlike the TwitBin Firebox plugin we have previously review, but like the Facebook app it comes with a better feature set, including action buttons allowing for direct messaging, profiles and nudging.

My only gripe with the Twitter client is that it doesn’t update as frequently as Twitterrific and there was no obvious way of changing the update frequency that I could find.

Account support is also available for Photobucket, Piczo, Del.icio.us and Magnolia.

Media Bar

The media bar is not new to Flock, but where as the service was previously focused on Flickr, Facebook support is now integrated, providing drag and drop uploads. Another feature Facebook addicts will love.

Web Clipboard

Flock now comes with what they call a “web clipboard” that allows users to drag and drop anything they see into it via the sidebar, including urls, text and images. The idea is that they can then be used when needed on other sites by drag and drop again, or via image upload as required. We’ve seen Firefox plugins before that do a similar job, but the way this is built into Flock does make it a more appealing offering. It also helps that it works well.

Blogging client

The blogging client has long been one of Flocks selling points but I’m afraid that it was really my only major disappointment with the 1.0 release. It’s a solid blog client (always has been) in doing the basics, but it fails miserably with image management. Flock doesn’t support the uploading of images to a blog and provides users with only two alternatives: upload the image to Facebook or Flickr for displaying in the post, or worst of all display the picture sourced from another web site; basically stealing someone else’s bandwidth. It really isn’t that hard to build in image uploading to WordPress or similar blog platforms, here’s hoping it’s something that Flock might address in future releases

Other features

Flock offers a browser based RSS reader which does a decent enough job for those who prefer their feeds served locally as opposed to a service like Google Reader. The media bar has expanded from simply being a photo management tool to a browsing tool that includes YouTube videos. In the case of YouTube, user accounts of videos you view are added to the YouTube sidebar. I’m not sure exactly what the appeal of this feature is, but some will like it.

Overall

Flock launched 2 years ago tomorrow so they’ve been around long enough to get their product right. It’s been a difficult two years for the startup as they’ve had to battle against a marketplace that wasn’t that receptive to new browsers. The new Flock isn’t for everyone, but it will win new fans.

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Story Blender

Story Blender is an online collaborative video production platform where people can work together to “blend” their content into a new multimedia show. StoryBlend’s online editing tool lets users create videos by “blending” images, sound, text, and video clips. When users have created new video blends they can then share it with their friends and the StoryBlend community.

Session 3 starts. CEO is also the founder of Cyworld.

Online video mixing with friends, nice interface.Multi-level relationship model for contributions, friend of a friend sort of thing. Easy to use video mashing with lots of features

TripIt

TripIt is a travel organizer that helps do-it-yourself travelers manage their travel plans. Travelers manage their travel itinerary with TripIt by forwarding their purchase confirmation emails to the service. TripIt automatically creates master itineraries with travel plans and other critical information like weather, maps and driving directions, and destination information. You can print or access your itinerary from anywhere including online, in print and on their web-enabled mobile devices. They can also share itineraries and travel calendars and collaborate on planning trips with friends.

CEO and Founder is ex-Hotwire, along with most of the team.

TripIt wants to eliminate the vanilla travel folder, bringing the travel itinerary into the 21st century. Travel is an information management business, TripIt is not a booking service.

Users send their plans to plans@tripit.com, compiles online itinerary, a sort of travel plan aggregation.

TripIt supports export to iCal and other platforms, also looking at microformats

Friends can share travel calenders. TripIt believes a multi-functional travel planner with collaborative tools will be a much needed service.

Site is live today, out of beta. I’d like to see the site before I pass judgment, but in theory it’s a great idea.

Flock

Flock is a social web browser we have reported on extensively. With Flock, people can discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites. Flock is offering custom browser modifications as a revenue model. To date, Flock has shipped editions of its browser for Photobucket and Piczo.

Flock feels that the browser has not evolved over time, and that’s a market opportunity for them. So interesting new features, Facebook sidebar was something new to me. Drag and drop functionality has improved a lot since earlier versions.

I’ll be honest, I’ve not be a Flock fan previously, the new version demoed here (release in 2 weeks) really is something more than Firefox with plugins. I’ll be taking another look at Flock soon.

MusicShake

South Korean MusicShake is a online amateur music mixing service. The service lets users create their own professional quality music using various tools. They hope to provide personalized music for ringtones, and personal websites (blogs, profiles). The service is developed and distributed by SilentMusicBand Corp.

Korean company. Started with music and the speaker dancing on stage. Funny start, he danced worse than I do

Speaker asked whether it was a Britney Spears track…music was created by a 9 year old girl in Korea with no experience of real music…just like Britney Spears.

Demo of interface. Seems simple to us, based on mixing music tracks and sound effects. Tracks are recommended by “Nuba,” the robot behind Musicshake.

170,000 music tracks, 1 million by 1 million. Also a model for creators to make music and sell it on the 50/ 50 rev share.

One of the best presentations so far, big round of applause. Fun idea.

8020 Publishing

8020 Publishing is a media company that publishes user generated magazines. They currently have two magazines JPG and the yet-to-launch Everywhere. Members of the 8020 community can contribute and critique the content in the magazines. However, 8020 Publishing still fills normal publishing roles like choosing themes, putting the magazines together and providing the final vote on all published content. The community also gives them a built-in subscription base not to mention loyal online communities.

8020 is aiming to “make magazines better.” JPG Magazine is used as an example.

Launching “Everywhere” Magazine, the “insiders experience”…travel magazine that is submitted by the community.

All submissions are added to the website, best make the magazine. Geographic focused search.

Submissions 300-500 words to make it easy to participate.

Interesting model, you’ll like this if you like JPG Mag.

Expert panel: Ron Conway, Don Dodge, Rajeev Motwani, and Yossi Vardi

Jason Calacanis asks Yossi Vardi for his favorite, answers: two that appealed Music Shake, will appeal to young people, and Flock, presuming that the user interface isn’t too hard to use. He can see himself using TripIt.

Don Dodge favorites: Music Shake and Story Blender, reminded him of his days at Napster. Question to Story Blender: what about copyright on the videos. A: YouTube didn’t block the copyright material from day 1, they will block copyright content at the “community manager” level.

Michael Arrington asks Don Dodge about copyright, A: just because you haven’t been sued, doesn’t mean you wont end up being sued.

Rajeev Motwani loves Music Shake, wish he’d come up with himself. Also likes TripIt, “Useful and solving a real problem.”

Ron Conway: likes TripIt and Story Blender. TripIt simple idea with potential to grow virally + from an investor view point can be easy monetized. Story Blender is in video, biggest growth opportunity on the internet and a Story Blender is unique idea.

Discussion about 8020’s model, how they pay, copyright. Authors hand over their content when they submit.

Audience questions: is video the hottest market online: Ron Conway, yes, and it’s getting easier as the tech catches up in terms of copyright filtering.

Don Dodge to Flock: market is old, entrench, how do you overcome that, and what is the business model. Flock: partner business, we work with others to include functionality. Multi-site membership works for us by making management easier. In terms of choice, Firefox 1.0 launched less than 3 years ago, 100million + users, there is choice and people will switch. They also have a search relationship with Yahoo that is a main revenue stream.

Jason Calacanis: why not just do Flock as a Firefox extension. Flock: most people dont use Firefox extension, we are targeting the broader market.

Michael Arrington to Flock: you’ve taken far too long to release 1.0, over 2 years, given plenty of rope. Can you guarantee that you wont take users for granted in the future. Flock: yes, people love us…and it’s a great product. (didn’t respond directly to the 2 year comment).

Question to Music Shake: will it translate. MS: yes, music is universal and if I hadn’t told you the demo song was made by a Sth Korean girl you wouldn’t have known.

Conclusion: best panel yet, particularly in terms of the qaulity of the startups. Hard to pick a favorite, Music Shake was certainly the most original idea, TripIt for practical use. Flock impressed.

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Mozilla has released details on The Coop, a new product that will incorporate social networking features directly into the Firefox browser. This is not good news for the privately-backed social browser Flock (also built on Mozilla), which is yet to release a 1.0 version of its browser. Many of the proposed features and some of the mockups created by Mike Beltzner (see above) suggest a significant overlap in the two products.

In fact, Coop even has an example screen shot of Flock on the wiki page describing the product, along with the description “The design will likely resemble [formerly of Flock] Chris Messina’s mockup for “People in the Browser”, with a horizontal bar containing avatars for a user’s friends, and icons overlaid on those avatars to indicate the presence of new content.”

The Coop product will allow Firefox users to “subscribe” to friends in the browser, bringing those friends into a sidebar. Those friends can share content and web pages with you (receive content from you, and send content to you).

Adding a friend will mean getting access to a broad array of their published web content. Content will be pulled from that person’s Flickr photo feed, del.icio.us tag feed, MySpace status , YouTube favorites, etc. When you want to share content with that user, you simply drag it into their avatar (see mockups below).

As Larry Dignan notes, The Coop could also have an impact on social networks that depend on constant user page refreshes to maintain pageview growth. Having status information on your friends directly in the browser could significantly lessen the need to visit those sites directly.

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Seven of the companies are still on the list. Six have dropped off to make room for new products, and I’ve added two more to round out the list to fifteen total products. Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

800-Free-411

Jingle’s free 411 service has saved me a serious amount of cash this last year. They now account for over 3% of the U.S. market for information calls, and AT&T has announced that they are going to copy them. That’s good news for consumers, who have to pay up to $3.50 per 411 call today. Our coverage is here.

Amie Street

Amie Street, which launched in July, has a brilliant DRM-free music sales model. Bands upload music, which can then be downloaded for free by users. As songs become popular, the site starts to charge for it. They start at $0.01 and go up to $0.99. Users looking for popular new stuff go right to the more expensive songs. More adventurous types try out lots of new music. I’m somewhere in the middle. This free-market place to set the value of DRM-free digital music could be the future. Our coverage is here.

Ask City

Bloglines dropped off the list this year, but another Ask.com property, the recently launched Ask City, has been added. In our very subjective opinion Ask City has replaced Yahoo Maps as the best mapping product on the Internet. My favorite features are multipoint directions an the annotation tools that allow you to draw and write on a map before forwarding to friends. Ask City is less than a month old and it’s already one of our favorite apps. Our writeup is here.

BlueDot

BlueDot is a social bookmarking service that is similar to del.icio.us. I’ve started using it instead of del.icio.us becasue I like the interface better and it allows sharing of bookmarks just among friends, whereas with del.icio.us you have to choose between fully public and fully private bookmarks. The company launched in July and had an update in October.

Digg

Anyone who reads this blog knows my position on Digg, where users pick what news makes it to the home page. It’s the future of news, and the most disruptive force to mainstream media since blogs were born. Digg has to continue to battle spam while pleasing its most active users, which won’t be easy. But I use the Digg site every day. Our coverage of Digg is here.

Flickr

Flickr is our first holdover from last year’s list. In the last year we’ve seen a bunch of startups gunning for Flickr, but as of now it is still the photo tagging and sharing site that we use every day. The new geotagging feature is incredible. We’d like to see facial recognition, similar to what Ookles is doing, next. Our coverage of Flickr is here.

Flock

We’ve been fans of Flock since we first started covering it during the original Bar Camp in August 2005. It just feels like a complete ecosystem rather than the hodge podge of sometimes incompatible additional add-ons that you get with Firefox. If Flock didn’t exist I’d be a happy Firefox user, but it does, and I use it as my primary browser. The rumor is that they have a big new release coming very soon. Our coverage of Flock is here.

Gmail

Despite recent problems, I think Gmail is now at least as functional as most desktop email applications (like Outlook and Mac Mail), and darn close to perfect. The reason? Lots of storage, the ability to tag emails and the recent addition of POP access to other email accounts. All for the great price of – free.

NetNewsWire

I’ve used NewsGator’s NetNewsWire desktop feed reader from the moment I switched to a Mac in early 2006. It’s not free, but having fast and offline access to feeds was worth the $30 I paid for it. Bloglines dropped off the list because of NetNewsWire, although I expect to be moving over to Google Reader in the near future. Offline access is less important now that I have EVDO cellular access, and Google Reader made significant improvements to its product in its September upgrade.

Netvibes

Netvibes is another holdover from last year. We go there multiple times per day to get a quick overview of a few important feeds. The company continues to gain users at a torrid pace, and has plenty of money in the bank after a $15 million round earlier this year. My guess is Netvibes is fending off multiple acquisition offers at this point, and may not be an independent entity at the end of 2007. Our coverage of Netvibes is here.

Pandora

Pandora is yet another holdover from last year, and a company that we’ve covered since before its launch in 2005. My bet is that I’ve racked up more hours listening to music on Pandora than any other user – it’s almost always playing while I write. Millions of loyal users agree with me. Our coverage is here.

Skype

Skype may be the single biggest productivity booster since email. I use it as my primary instant messaging client, and of course for free on the fly calls almost daily. Skype is one of the Internet’s killer apps. Our coverage of Skype is here.

Techmeme

TechMeme is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. Stuff on TechMeme hits the New York Times and other newspapers days later. My father is as addicted to Techmeme’s political sister site, Memorandum, as I am to the technology news area. Our coverage of TechMeme is here and here.

Wordpress

We’ve been mostly happy customers of Wordpress since TechCrunch started. It’s the most flexible blogging platform, and their Akismet comment spam blocking service has saved us from nearly 1 million spammy comments. We’d have to hire a full time person just to moderate comments and trackbacks if Akismet wasn’t as good as it is. Our coverage of Wordpress is here.

YouTube

YouTube is far from being a young startup, having been acquired by Google for $1.65 billion earlier this year. And even though they sent us a cease & desist letter just two months ago, we remain YouTube addicts. Fire Engines! Bananas! Humanity is a beautiful thing. Earlier YouTube coverage is here.

Almost on the List

A few companies almost made the list as well – AllOfMP3, AllPeers, Last.fm, Meebo, Wikipedia and Zoho were right on the edge, as well as others. I just had to cut the list off somewhere.

Agree? Disagree? Tell me all about it in the comments.

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The UK continues to be Piczo’s biggest market, accounting for 40% of users and 50% of page views (see TechCrunch UK coverage of the company here).

Today at 5 am PST they will announce a number of distribution and other partnerships with major Internet companies, including YouTube, Flock, Photobucket and VideoEgg.

The most interesting partnership is the deal with Flock. Piczo will distribute a Piczo-branded version of the Flock browser (see a similar deal Flock announced in July with PhotoBucket). Flock and Piczo will split search revenue generated from the browser, and users will have easy access to Piczo content. From the press release:

When users download the Flock Piczo Edition browser, they will receive alerts when friends update their sites, providing an instant connection to their Piczo friends. Users will also be able to quickly and easily drag and drop content such as photos and videos into their Piczo Web page. Other features in the Flock Piczo Edition browser include access to bulk upload tools, uninterrupted login and web searching capabilities.

This is good news for Flock as well. They now have access to Piczo’s 10.5 million monthly unique visitors.

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Co-founder Geoffrey Arone stepped in with an explanation:

“Shadows is owned by the Pluck Corporation, who is doing quite well in their core business focused around social media. However, they have decided to de-emphasize the Shadows bookmarks product to focus on their other products.”

This looks to go beyond a simple partnership expiring – Pluck has been phasing out consumer facing products for some time (they announced their RSS reader will be shut down in January 2007) in favor of its new Blogburst publishing platform. In an email exchange this evening, Pluck CEO Dave Panos told me that Blogburst is “getting 100% of our attention” and “we haven’t added any new capabilities [for Shadows] since this Spring.”

That leaves Flock users with just one choice for social bookmarking: del.icio.us. Something tells me they’ll make do somehow.

And Shadows, which we note seems to have a 20 second load time this evening, enters the TechCrunch DeadPool.

More Flock coverage here.

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The Photobucket version of the Flock browser is identical to the one available at flock.com, except that Flickr functionality has been stripped out, leaving Photobucket as the sole choice for photo integration. Details of the deal were not announced (in fact, the deal itself was not announced), but I assume that Flock is sharing search and other revenues streams generated by users of the browser with Photobucket. Based on unsubstantiated but largely circulated rumors around Firefox search revenue, the two companies can expect $2-3 per user per year from the partnership.

Given how closely Flock has integrated with Yahoo services in the main version of their browser (del.icio.us, Flickr and Yahoo Search), I would not be surprised to see a Yahoo version of Flock sometime soon.

TechCrunch posts on Photobucket are here, and Flock are here. The Photobucket version of Flock is available for download here.

I’ve downloaded the extension and tried it out. It works as promised, although it requires constant re-sizing of the IM windows to make it work right. Until the kinks are worked out (possibly via Meebo’s support of the project, which I encourage), I don’t recommend using it.

But I do support the idea behind this entirely. IM should (optionally) be pulled right into the browser, where most of the action on a computer today occurs anyway. There should be no need to use a separate set of clients on the desktop for IM, or even go to Meebo’s website. Just as Flock has built a photo uploader directly into the browser (for flickr and photobucket), they should integrate IM functionality directly into it as well.

More TechCrunch posts on Flock are here and Meebo are here.

I interviewed the Flock founders – Bart Decrem, Geoffrey Arone and Anthony Young – as well as investor Jason Pressman from Shasta Ventures, last night. The podcast of the discussion is up on TalkCrunch, here.

Flock is a Mozilla based browser (see also Songbird, another application built on the Mozilla code base). They’ve built additional features to the core Firefox code base that make the browsing experience more seamless, including photo integration with Flickr or photobucket, social bookmarking integration with Del.icio.us or Shadows, a blogging tool, enhanced search and a RSS reader.

Photos

Photos stored in either Flickr or Photobucket are integrated directly into the browser experience, scrolled horizontally just above the browser window. Photos can be uploaded to these accounts by dragging them into the browser. Or, photos can be added to any web page that accepts html (a comment area on a blog, for example) by dragging the photo directly into the web page. This is the single most compelling reason (for me) that I’ve switched to using Flock – to bring my Flickr photos to the desktop.

Photobucket and Flickr are currently supported. More photo services will be integrated over time (I’ve suggested that CNET’s AllYouCanUpload be supported as well, for example).

Bookmarking

Flock also has close integration with Del.icio.us and Shadows social bookmarking accounts. Clicking on the star button next to the address bar bookmarks the current page, and metadata such as tags can also be added. More bookmarking sites will be supported over time.

Blogging, Search, RSS

Flock has an integrated blogging tool, with integrated tagging, that works with most major blogging platforms. Users can switch between preview and html views. Search via the top right drop down (same location as Firefox) is set to Yahoo as a default, and an be changed to Google, Technorati, Wink, etc. (no support for MSN or Live.com search though). Beginning to type in a search query brings up a pop up box that shows recent bookmarked sites, visited sites and search results from the default search engine.

The integrated RSS reader is excellent (image above to left). Any visited web page with a feed shows the orange feed icon in the address bar. Clicking on it shows a preview of the feed. Another click and you are subscribed. Within the reader feeds can be read individually, or in “river of news” fashion.

Flock will make the majority of their revenue from the search bar, just as Firefox does. They have a revenue share agreement with search providers for searches completed through the browser. The low end estimates I’ve heard suggest that Firefox generates at least $2-3 per year per user. Flock is also going to charge service providers to integrate directly into the browser, and plans on launching co-branded browsers with partners to increase distribution. Given their close relationship with Yahoo (search, del.icio.us and flickr integration), I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Yahoo version of Flock distributed sometime this year.

Flock has also raised a new round of financing led by Shasta Ventures, rumored to be in the $10 million range. Previous investors included Bessemer Venture Partners and Catamount Ventures.

The reason for this particular round of naysaying is the launch of the impressive Performancing Firefox plugin that allows extremely easy blogging, from Firefox, for Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger. Performancing is getting extremely good reviews from top bloggers like Paul Kedrosky, Om Malik and Steve Rubel.

But the attacks didn’t start with the release of Performancing. They go way back. Flock even has its own hate blog (flocksucks.wordpress.com) (although this one substitutes common cruelty for actual insight and humor).

My guess is Flock is suffering from a bit of backlash over its early hype. And my further guess is that Flock, backed by an impressive group of founders and investors, has a few massive tricks up its sleeve that will be announced (or leak out) sometime soon.

Until now Flock has done little to fuel all the hype, and have likewise refrained from responding to the criticism.

Tonight, however, Flock’s Chris Messina, supported by CEO Bart Decrem, takes issue with some of the bashing.

I like this post, and not just because Chris at one point says “jack-in-the-box assclown” or calls web surfing with Firefox extensions “Firefox and Duct tape”. Chris gives a passionate, if not entirely fact laden, speach on what the hell they are trying to accomplish over at Flock.

But no, see, that’s where Flock comes in. Or I don’t care, don’t call it Flock. Whatever you want, but that’s where the thing we’re building comes in. That’s why we exist, that’s why we matter, that’s what the point is.

Yeah, Firefox and Duct tape, it’ll help. Sure sure. It’ll get you some of the way there. But hell, when I’m talking to someone, engaged in a conversation that threatens my very existence, or that threatens to change the way I flip my omelettes, man, I do not want my mouth to fall off at the jaw because it wasn’t tested, wasn’t built right, didn’t have a million beedy eyes boring down on it while it was being fastened to my head, making sure the stupid thing would function in the real world without needing pliers or a tireiron to get it to work right.

My last post on Flock, covering its beta launch, is here.

Disclaimer: I like Flock and the Flock employees. I get excited about big ideas. And I believe Flock can be a big idea.

Feedback to their recent beta expansion has been so positive, Geoffrey tells me, that there is no reason to delay any longer.

Congratulations Flock! I imagine tens of thousands of people will be downloading and using their product by end of day. Make sure you upload your del.icio.us bookmarks and try out the blogging tool.

UPDATE: Flock is now live:

Flock Developer Preview is now available.

Our code couldn’t wait any longer to be free!

But! This preview ain’t for the faint of heart! If you’re the bleeding-edge type and don’t mind a few scrapes and busted knees from time to time, feel free to give it a whirl.

We’ve got interesting ideas in this thing. We want to know what we’ve done right how we could improve. And we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us!

So if a bucket of source code and developer binaries sound enticing, head over to our Developer page now.

The product, which was good back in August when I first tested it, is even better today. I’m a big supporter of Flock. I am even writing this post while wearing a Flock tshirt. Flock is definitely the Flickr of browsers.

The three most powerful tools Flock offers it’s users are bookmarks, blogging and a RSS reader.

Bookmarks

They’ve dropped their propreitary bookmarking engine and have replaced it with del.icio.us. I have a ton of del.icio.us bookmarks – thousands – and it took a while for the browser to chug through them all during the import procedure. But it did, and I now have one hell of an interface into my favorite bookmarking service. Since Flock supports tabbed browsing, I can keep bookmarks open in a separate tab and refer back whenever. Partnering with Del.icio.us is brilliant. I do not know if they have plans to integrate with other social bookmarking sites, but I imagine it would be fairly simple for them to do.

Blogging

The blogging tool was, and remains, absolutely the best I’ve seen. This tool brings flickr pictures directly into the blog tool, allowing simple drag and drop into the post. It’s dual-pane, with both wysiwyg and html interfaces (I actually preferred the old toggle method of changing from html to wysiwyg, but I’m not complaining). Setup is very simple. It just works.

RSS Reader

Flock also has a built in RSS reader that is both dead simple to use and yet powerful enough for heavy users. A simple drop down box can be accessed for any page that allows you to grab the feed for the page you are currently on, and add it to an existing or newly created folder. Feeds can be tagged, and the viewer allows for expanded or collapsed feed viewing.

There are some speed issues with this version, 0.5, but in my opinion it has more than enough features to convince web users by the millions to switch from their default browser and go with Flock. Let’s launch this thing!

Zvents

My friend Ethan Stock showed off Zvents, which launched last night. We’ve written about zvents here and here. In a nutshell, Zvents helps you create and locate the tens of thousands of monthly local events and has tons of awesome ajax, tagging and other web2.0 stuff.

KnowNow

Ron Rasmussen talked about KnowNow, an interesting RSS-based alert system (they call it “elerts”). I’d like to understand this one better and am hoping to sit down with Ron this week.

Orb

Ian McCarthy gave us a tantalizing presentation on Orb, which allows you to stream content from your home computer to any wifi device without the need for any hardware. It works extremely well for video, photos, etc. He even pulled up a video cam in his living room and used Orb to turn the light on. Cool. It’s PC only right now though.

Wink

Michael Tanne took the password protections off Wink today so we could finally get a look. Wink is “people powered search” and methinks they are on to something powerful. They take basic search results and allow people to tag and rank them to create a much better result set. They’ve called their technology “tagrank”.

Damnit, Michael, answer my emails and give me an interview tomorrow.

Allpeers

Matthew Gertner presented on allpeers, an open platform to develop applications on firefox. Allpeers is in private beta currently.

Flock

Bart Decrem gave a Flock demo. What more can I say about Flock? I love it in a way that isn’t natural. If they could find a way to integrate Pandora direclty into the Flock browser, I’d never leave my computer again.

But seriously, I’ve got my hands on the new version and will do a full profile this week.

PubSub

Founder Bob Wyman spoke about PubSub, structured blogging and their new LinkRanks product, which we wrote about here. More on PubSub, our favorite prospective search engine, here.

We begged a beta invitation to Flock a while back and wrote about it in a profile written on August 26, 2005

There have been significant improvements since then. The blogging tool is even slicker than it was before, with incredibly easy flickr integration, blog editing (dual pane with code/wysiwyg viewers) and other features.

Bookmarks are now integrated with del.icio.us, which just makes so much more sense than their original idea of creating a separate social bookmarking product.

Flock is looking like a very powerful and very beautiful product.

Flock Offices

The Flock offices are literally in a garage off of University Ave in Palo Alto. Most people were awake and coding when we stopped by in the early afternoon. Andy Smith, pictured left, was the lone exception. Garage, sleeping engineers, cases of Red Bull…a true startup is a wonderful thing.

Business Week Essay

Make sure you read Rob Hof’s Flock essay on Business Week. It’s…very complete.

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.

Overview

Flock is a new browser, built on top of firefox. It is a functional browser with excellent features (including firefox features like tabbed browsing, etc.). What really makes is stand out are two additional features they’ve added to build social networking directly into the browsing experience: social bookmarking and a wysiwyg blog writing tool.

Flock was originally called Round Two and raised money (reportedly around $1 million) from Bessemer Venture Partners. For more on the fundraising and early reports, see Om Malik and SiliconBeat.

We got our first look at Flock at Bar Camp last weekend – Andy Smith and Chris Messina gave a great demo. Our beta invitation came that weekend as well.

Flock should be launching publicly sometime in September. They have windows, mac and linux versions of their browser already.

Social Bookmarking

Flock has integrated del.icio.us-type features right into the browser. When you are on a page you would like to bookmark, simply press a “+” button on the top left of the toolbar and the page is automatically included in your bookmark area (called your “breadcrumbs”). You can also tag bookmarks, of course.

Additional features include your “watchlist” (people who’s bookmarks you would like to monitor), and “groups” (basically, defined groups of flockers linking to this category).

Breadcrumbs, Watchlists and Groups all have RSS feeds (of course).

Blogging Tool

This is pure magic. We’ve tested most blogging tools out there, including qumana (the best in our opinion – profiled here and here), blogjet (Jeff Clavier likes this one) and others. All of these requre a download and allow offline drafting and wysiwyg functionality.

I have to say I think Flock blows them all away. I’m dying to show a screen shot, but Flock has asked it’s beta testers not to (so ignore the very, very small screen shot above). To show this right now would be pushing the limits of their trust, so I won’t.

But it rocks. Setup was very easy (I tested it with my personal blog). It has functionality for editing posts (even posts not created with Flock), quick toggle between preview and viewing the actual code, and, the best feature in my opinion, the ability to simply drag flickr photos direclty into the post and manipulate them. They also allow quick and easy technorati tagging. Wow. I mean, really, wow. This stuff is not trivial to build. The ajax funtionality is stunning.

Team

Bart Decrem is Flock’s CEO and co-founder. The rest of the team includes:

• Andy Smith
• Anthony Young
• Chris Messina
• Daryl Houston
• Geoffrey Arone
• Ian McKellar
• Robin Slomkowski

Link

Additional Reading

Roland Tanglao has an exellent early review. Also see: Greg Yardley, SolutionWatch, Micha Hernandez, Will Pate, InternetWeek, IOError