Zynga Acquires Flock Social Media Browser

Zynga Buys Flock, the First Social Networking Browser

Zynga, the evil masterminds behind FarmVille and other social-media games, will acquire Flock, the first social-media browser. Flock first hit the scene in 2005, fulfilling a need that did not yet exist. Flock combined Twitter and Facebook feeds into the bezel of a Firefox-based (now Chromium-based) browser, so you could have all your social-media inputs in one place.

While Flock slowly acquired users (it boasts 10 million worldwide), browser technology has developed around it: microblog clients like TweetDeck and browser bookmarklets like bit.ly have become part of a switched-on web user's daily work (or play-) flow. Also, websites themselves have been adding those ubiquitous share buttons, so even those browser compliments are not as crucial as they once were.

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Flock: the First Social Media Browser

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uploaded by Jordan Yerman

Why Buy Flock In the First Place?

Even in a market which may be fictional, Flock is threatened by Rockmelt. So why buy the property? Probably to get hold of the development team itself: even though nobody was using Twitter at the time Flock launched, there's no doubting the forward thinking behind it. Zynga is locked in perpetual combat with other developers of similar games and web toys, and the emergence of Rockmelt probably triggered some sort of opportunity alert.

(Flock acquisition announcement)