On November 5th, the long overdue yet highly anticipated new web browser, Flock, was launched for public consumption. Will the year-overdue browser have a measurable effect on the way people experience online content? It is too early to tell, but we see great promise so far. As Scott Gilbertson writes in the Wired Blog, Flock “comes at time when more and more of us are relying on social networks to keep in touch with friends. But the tools for doing so are spread all across the web, and that’s what Flock wants to change. Flock attempts to consolidate all your social networking management tools in one place — the browser.”
The plan: bold. The results: compelling.
Pandemic Labs was quick to download this possible game-changer and after 48 hours with Flock it is clear to us that this isn’t your grandma’s web browser. It was incredibly easy to link Flock to our Facebook and Twitter profiles, our YouTube and Flickr accounts, and even this blog. The browser integrates all the normal web-browsing functionality that we rely on with the social networking architecture that we all love. It is truly a silky-smooth experience to find a picture you love while browsing the web and with just a drag over to your ‘People’ sidebar, be able to post it to your favorite social media site. This much is clear: the power of Flock for both the user and the online marketer lies in its seamless integration of Web 2.0 social structures and the more traditional internet.
To be clear, this is not a tech blog and our goal here is not to review what Flock can do or what problems it still has. If you’re interested in a goo
d old-fashioned review, we recommend the “First Look” on the WIRED blog network. The focus of this article is instead to discuss the implications of Flock within the realm of social media. Even with its still-buggy 1.0 release, Flock is blurring the lines between a user’s social network and their rest-of-the-web experience. As these boundaries are removed, new avenues are created which facilitate and encourage the sharing of social media. With Flock it is now literally a one-click process to post a funny video to your Facebook profile without ever leaving the site that you are on. Flock’s ‘people’ tab and media browser also notify you the instant your friends post something new to their own site even while you are arms deep in internet research. It almost goes without saying that if Flock were to hit a critical mass of users, this feature would significantly improve the viraling process as the time between seeding, forwarding and re-forwarding is significantly decreased.
The integration of social media into the entire web browsing experience is a serious boon for viral advertisers such as Pandemic Labs because it opens new corridors of infection in addition to streamlining the current infection channels. It’s true that Flock doesn’t have the power to make bad creative go viral, but for high-quality viral media, Flock makes it significantly easier for consumers to willingly spread the campaign. If Flock succeeds in building its own flock of users (Flock expects 100 million users within five years), we could see a significant spike in the number of photos and videos that are shared between Facebook and other social networks. In the words of Flock co-founder and former CEO, Bart Decrem, “The Web is not just a library of documents, but a stream of events and people. And people are spending a lot more time sharing on the Web.”
In conclusion, Flock is definitely something to keep an eye on from a viral marketing standpoint. The technical difficulties and updates to the browser are things for other bloggers to discuss. At Pandemic Labs we are most concerned with Flock’s penetration into the market and the online user response to the 
integration of social networks. To that end, our patent-pending Facebook media application, TeeVee, (due to launch in January ‘08) has been tailored to fit seamlessly into the Flock framework and provide users with unmatched control of their media sharing abilities both within and outside the social graph. At Pandemic Labs our primary research focus, both related to Flock and in general, is watching new technology and understanding how it can be leveraged to increase the success of our clients’ viral campaigns.
As always, we encourage comments and responses to our articles. If you have a comment or a question for Pandemic Labs that you would not like to make in a public venue, please email us here.
