Flock project comes to an end

Earlier today an announcement was posted on the Flock website stating that on April 26th, 2011 that the project and servers would be shutting down. There is no reason specified as to why the project is suddenly discontinuing. However, there is some speculation that it may be because of Zynga – makers of Farmville, Cityville and other browser Flash games – acquiring Flock Inc. in January of this year. Since the Flock project is coming to an end, they’re recommending that their users back up their data. Sync and social networking features in Flock will no longer work on April 26th.

The project began April 11th, 2005 and shuts down on April 26th, 2011 – just six years later. Flock was a web browser that specialized in Web 2.0 and social networking interfaces that were integrated into the UI. Originally Flock was based on the Gecko HTML rendering engine by Mozilla, but at version three Flock changed to Chromium which is based on WebKit.

The Flock Team has recommended that their users switch over to Firefox or Chrome if they wish. While they will be able to continue using Flock, the key features will not be available after April 26th. Many former Flock users have said that they will be switching over to RockMelt as it has similar features.