Flock turns to customized browser experiences, launches Gloss edition

Written on July 23, 2008 – 4:09 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

Allen Stern over at Center Networks writes about the launch of Gloss, a custom edition of the Flock social web browser. The customized editions comes with pink flavors, a new set of badges with lipstick on them, and custom pre-filled content mainly around the topic of entertainment, gossip, celebrities and fashion.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, Flock Gloss is targeted primarily at women. Launch partners include Glam Media, Glamour, The Budget Fashionista, TMZ, Cosmo, DesignerApparel, PopSugar, iVillage and others.

I think these customized versions are an excellent way of introducing Flock to users who’ve never tried an alternative browser before. Previously, Flock created a German edition of the browser and an environment-friendly Eco edition. I’m looking forward to seeing what else they’ll come up with.

Last May, the company announced a new round of financing in the $15 million range.

On a personal note: I used to live Flock once but was repeatedly disappointed with the memory resources it consumes, the lack of speed, and regular crashes. It has led me to conclude that Flock may actually not be for internet power users, but rather for regular users who like to interact with each other socially on the web.

I hope you like that post!

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browser, Flock, flock eco, flock gloss, gloss, social browser

About the author: Robin Wauters is a Belgium-based social media consultant, startup advisor, blogger, entrepreneur, Twitter fanatic, conference organizer and allround web addict. Between trying out just about every new web application that gets in his sight, he advises local startups like ContactOffice, Oxynade and Yuntaa. And when he's not busy trying to keep tabs with what's going on in the virtualization & cloud computing industry as managing editor of Virtualization.com, he's probably working on the organization of Plugg, an annual celebration of European web entrepreneurship.

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3 comments/trackbacks to “Flock turns to customized browser experiences, launches Gloss edition”

Jul 24, 2008: Social web browser for women: gloss : The Next Women
[...] has launched, a custom edition of the Flock social web browser, as thenextweb and Center Networks [...]

By Leon on Jul 23, 2008

Robin,
We are sorry to hear that you’ve had performance problems with flock in the past. Have you tried our 2.0 beta? It is based off of Firefox 3 and includes many speed and stability improvements. It’s still in beta but it’s quite stable. If you haven’t tried it yet then we’d love it if you’d downloaded it from our site, give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

Cheers.

[Reply]
By Robin Wauters on Jul 23, 2008

Hi Leon, thanks for dropping by. I think I’ve tried every version of Flock for a long time and ultimately gave up because I kept running into the same problems.

Flock’s a great product, just not for me. I depend on reliability, speed, as well as many extensions on a day-to-day basis that aren’t compatible with Flock that I don’t think I’m ever going to stop using Firefox.

[Reply]

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