Social Browser Flock Gains Users, Turns 1.1

The "social Web browser" Flock - based on the same Mozilla engine as Firefox - says it's gaining users...and version 1.1 adds support for Web mail, friend tracking, and Picassa.

Version 1.1 of the “social Web browser” Flock has been released, adding new features that enable users to tap into social networking sites and services directly from their browser, rather than having to laboriously log into services and access things individually. Flock 1.1 enables users to monitor friends’ activity on supported social networks, access GMail and Yahoo Web-based email, and integrates support for the Picassa photo sharing service, enabling users to upload up to 1,00 images to Picassa using the Flock uploader.

The new features complement support for services like YouTube, Photobucket, Flickr, and Facebook that appeared in the 1.0 release.

Flock is available for free for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux users. The browser is based on the Mozilla rendering engine (the same used by Firefox) and went through a long beta gestation period were it added features and tried to bring social media and application off of Web pages and truly integrate them into a Web browser.

Flock claims to be gaining significant numbers of users, boasting that since the introduction of its 1.0 version, the browser has been downloaded nearly 3 million times and over 70 percent of those users have made it their default Web browser. Flock says that in January and February of 2008, the number of active Flock users has grown by 135 percent, with daily downloads in February totaling more than three times those in January.

“The broad majority of our growth has been generated by way of recommendation,” said Flock CEO Shawn Hardin, in a statement. “Our users tell us that Flock is a whole new way to experience the web, and they find it addictive.”