Flock was purchased by social gaming company Zynga in January for an undisclosed amount. “The Flock team joined Zynga in January, 2011 and is now working to assist Zynga in achieving their goal of building the most fun, social games available to anyone, anytime — on any platform,” the company said on its website.

Flock said it recommends users either switch to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. The 5-year old browser had 10 million users globally who were attracted to Flock for it ability to help them manage social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Flock says its new 3.5 version offers greater ease of use and faster performance, likely in response to its recently launched competitor RockMelt.  The company says it has reached an installed user base of  over 9.5 million users globally and calls itself “the social browser market leader.”

Users of the browser can view their social content via a Flock Sidebar, which includes tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn status updates, RSS feeds, and YouTube and Flickr content.

“We’re seeing great overall growth in users and engagement, including 57 million new activities conducted within new Flock per day, and over 4 billion activities over the last four months,” said Shawn Hardin, president and CEO of Flock.

“Our growth is 100% user-powered: 83 percent of our users say they have already recommended or intend to recommend the new Flock browser to their friends and family.”

The new Flock browser has been cloud-based with an API since June 2010. Flock for the Mac supports Leopard and Snow Leopard OSX and will be available on December 1. The PC upgrade on Chromium 7 will automatically be updated for current New Flock users or can be downloaded.

Of course Flock also places a great deal on what it’s already known for – social media activity from the browser. "Social isn’t bleeding edge any longer-it’s a game-changing, mass market phenomenon," Flock CEO Shawn Hardin tells WebProNews.

"Over the last year Flock conducted an incredible amount of customer research from one-on-one interviews to focus groups to analyzing anonymous data from millions of users," Hardin tells us. "It is clear that all age groups are now participating in social, and users are trying to balance the enormous benefits of staying connected with their friends while also managing the overwhelming amounts information that’s coming to them everyday. While they love their social networks, they’re seeking better ways to organize and manage the people and content they care about. The new Flock is all about helping users do that and we determined that the Chromium platform was the best platform for us to use in the redesign of Flock."

Flock has been working with Google’s Chromium team over the last year on this redesign, which is the first major browser outside of Chrome to be released on the Chromium platform. It comes with both the ability to do social networking/media search and social network grouping within the browser. "It will also be faster than IE and Firefox," a representative for Flock tells us.

With the Groups feature, users can "Channel Surf" the Web, as the company puts it, by switching the view of the scrolling sidebar between the conversations and information they are most interested in at any given time. There is also a "What Your Friends Are Saying" feature that shows exactly that – from multiple social networks.

"Our interactions with people online have changed everything about the way we discover, shop, work and play," says Hardin. "The new Flock is designed to naturally complement the value we place in relationships and puts you at the center of your friends and their conversations while you browse the Web. Conventional browsers like Internet Explorer and Safari aren’t built to bring together the conversations and content that matter to each user. Flock is the only browser with the best of the social Web built-in."

Google is the default search option for the browser, which is also able to tap into thousands of Chrome extensions, as it is based on the same technology as Chrome.

Flock is already the number one desktop app on Facebook and is ranked in the top 100 most popular of all Facebook apps. It’s also ranked the sixth most popular browser operating in Europe, according to Net Applications.

The new Flock browser is immediately available for Windows, and can be downloaded at Flock.com. The Mac version will be out later this summer.

Flock worked with MySpace and Vidoop to develop OpenID in the browser. Flock says that it now offers the most comprehensive discovery and management capabilities for OpenID currently available.

OpenID for Flock is now available to all Flock 2.0 users as an alpha extension. It’s available for download at https://extensions.flock.com and http://vidoop.com/labs/.

"We are three companies dedicated to helping people better share their content and experiences online, and we saw an opportunity to collaborate to quickly create a way for users to more easily manage their online identity," said Max Engel, product lead for the MySpace Data Availability Platform. 

"Our goal was to eliminate some of the work involved in jumping between social experiences on the Web. The extension we jointly developed will give the community an easier way to seamlessly carry their identity and preferences in their browser."

OpenID for Flock senses when a user visits a site that will accept an OpenID login. Users are able to choose which of their OpenIDs they want to login for each site and view the login history.

MySpace’s role in working with Flock to develop OpenID is part of its strategy to compete with rival social network Facebook, which recently launched Facebook Connect that allows users to sign into accounts on a variety of partner sites with Facebook Ids.
 

IDIB OpenID for Flock from phatbuddhaz on Vimeo.

The harmless little StumbleUpon button in the web browser makes it so easy to wander through the recommended sites of the plugin’s users that time stumbles past in rapid blocks. Giving a thumb’s up today means more than just a positive vote.

StumbleUpon agreed to donate funds to plant trees when its members give a thumbs-up to the special page they set up for Earth Day. Former New York Giants running back turned media personality Tiki Barber is also taking part in the Thumbs Up for Trees effort.

Flock brought out the economically sensitive version of its browser today. The Eco-Edition of Flock will put some of the company’s revenue into the environment.

Ten percent of the search proceeds generated by users of the Flock Eco-Edition browser will be donated to the environmental charity of the Flock community’s choice at the end of 2008. This special edition of the browser includes added environmentally-related content to the features already in Flock.

Speaking of green, Yahoo discloses their financial results today. But the company is also known for supporting green environmental causes; more information on that at Yahoo Green’s Earth Day 2008 site.

So, I did some researching and came up with one possible idea, Xinha4WP. It’s a WordPress plugin that replaces the default text editor with a much more advanced version. It also needs the Text Control plugin to work so you need to install that too.

Xinha4WP gives bloggers many features including all font control (sizes and colors), tables, additional smilies, special characters and few more items. The coolest thing is the maximize button that lets you make the editor the size if your browser window.

The downside is that it is a rather large plugin weighing in at 5.5mb. It is also showing up above the built in WordPress editor widow. This is not ideal to have two editor windows especially since the default WordPress one is ignored. This could be a conflict with the video pugin they using too. Not sure.

I’ve also recommended to the client some desktop blogging software that may give added control while not giving to much away. Like ScribeFire, Etco or Flock to name a few.

Personally, I don’t think I’d ever use Xinha4WP and Text Control, however others might find it quite useful. At the same time, I don’t usually have the need for altering text sizes and colors that often. It’ll be interesting to hear back from the client after a few weeks of use to see how they felt the plugin performed.

Do you require more control than the default WordPress editor gives you? If so, what do you use?

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Technorati

First think you need to know is what social media optimization is. Basically, it’s just getting exposure and traffic from social media sites like Digg, del.icio.us, MySpace and many others. For a more in depth explanation, check out the new rules for social media optimization.

What I’d like to share with you is one extremely easy way to get some social media exposure. It’s as easy as photo sharing.

Using photo sharing sites to host the images you use in your blog posts will give your site added exposure on other sites. Some photo sharing sites to check out include Zooomr, PhotoBucket and Flickr.

Flickr is one of the main photo sharing sites. Once you add your photos, they can be found by not only Flickr but also Technorati, Serph, the Flock web browser, Netvibes and other services that integrate with Flickr. It’s a quick and easy way to get in to lots of other sites.

To optimize this exposure, each photo should be linked back to your blog post. Here is a good example that has a link in the description to take you to the related blog post. By adding a basic link, you are driving traffic to your site and creating crawlable links for search engines.

You also need to make sure to tag each photo with a one or two word phrases that the image should be found for. A good title and description never hurt either.

Once you get a few images uploaded and linked, watch your stats and see if you are gaining traffic. You might not get a ton of traffic right away, but any additional visitors are visitors you may not have gotten otherwise.

Plus, buy outsourcing your image hosting, you save on bandwidth. That’s another little added bonus.

In the end, social media optimization is the ability to get your site exposure in areas that controlled by people and not by search engine rankings. They give you one more chance of hooking a potential visitor and photo sharing free and easy to do.

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It may be just an extension but it’s a pretty powerful one. It’s a full-featured editor that presents you with the kind of editing interface that makes it easy for anyone to write and publish a post (and you can also switch to code view if that’s your preference).

Setting it up is simplicity itself – run the config wizard, answer a couple of questions, provide your blog log-in info and you’re done. For configuring a TypePad blog, you then get your full list of categories – essential to have that.

So, very impressive after a quick run around the block with it. The only thing I can’t see functionality for is including trackback URLs. Maybe I’m just not seeing where that is. If it’s missing, then that’s a big negative. No spell checker either. But it is a beta.

I’ve written and published this post using Performancing. This gives Flock a run for its money, no question. How does it stack up against offline editors like ecto or BlogJet?

I’ll play with it some more to get a sense of that.

[Edit] Ok, I’m editing from within TypePad. The post did publish fine but it did not carry through the categories I’d set. Those categories were shown in the post in the list of posts but did not appear in the published post. So manually fixed. Same problem I experienced with Flock last month.

One other thing, too – no means of pinging.

Still, a very impressive tool.

Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

Even though it is still in development (nice warning when you download the installer: “If you have made it this far, chances are that you are aware of the risks associated with software that is nestled somewhere between the alpha and beta states”), it is very polished overall. As a browser, it certainly stands up against Firefox and Opera, not to mention Internet Explorer.

But I’m most impressed with using it to create and publish blog posts. Very easy indeed – easy to set up with your blog account and very easy to use with its clear WYSIWIG editor.

So far, I’ve successfully created and published posts to three different blogs – NevOn 2.0, my soon-to-be new blog home (running on WordPress 1.5.2), NevOn 2.0 Experimental (Movable Type 3.2) and this blog on TypePad. I’m writing this post with Flock.

It’s not perfect at the moment by any means (eg, odd line breaks when posting to the WordPress blog) and I wouldn’t use it as a replacement for ecto for Windows, my current and preferred offline editing tool.

But it’s certainly worth serious consideration as a blog editing tool.

I’ve not yet discovered half of its potential (dragging and dropping web content, connecting with Flickr, etc) but I will get to that soon enough.

Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.