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Tag: flock

  • Twitter’s Flock Developer Series & Hatch Contest: What You Need To Know

    Twitter is wooing developers more than ever in 2015. It’s hard to believe, but the company only recently held its first-ever developer conference, Flight. The October event saw the unveiling of Twitter’s Fabric developer kits and Digits sign-in.

    There are three modular kits that address stability, distribution, revenue, and identity. Fabric combines services from Twitter itself, as well as its Crashlytics and MoPub offerings and other things. The Crashlytics kit is for stability, The Twitter kit is for distribution, and the MoPub kit is for integrating ads into apps. Digits is a phone number-based sign-in, and is part of the Twitter kit. More on all of that here.

    Now, this year, Twitter is going on the road with a new developer event series called Flock.

    The Flock Takes Flight

    “Since we unveiled Fabric at our first mobile developer conference, many of you have started using the Kits to address some of the most common challenges facing app developers: stability, distribution, revenue and identity,” says Jeff Sandquist, Head of Developer and Platform Relations at Twitter. “We hope to meet many more of you over the coming months, so we’re hitting the road on a worldwide tour we’re calling Flock. We believe the next great app can come from anywhere so we are going everywhere we can to help you learn how to use Fabric to build great apps.”

    Flock is to consist of two phases. The first one is a road trip across the U.S., which will see Twitter’s team of developer advocates traveling in a Fabric bus from city to city to host meetups and seminars.

    The second phase will see the team of Fabric engineers and developer advocates traveling around the world to host a series of half-day events. Here are all of the dates:

    Los Angeles, CA: Jan. 21-25
    Las Vegas, NV: Jan. 26-27
    Denver/Boulder, CO: Jan. 28-31
    Kansas City, MO: Feb. 1-4
    St. Louis, MO: Feb. 5
    Nashville, TN: Feb. 6-9
    Chicago, IL: Feb. 10-11
    Detroit, MI: Feb. 12-13
    London: February 19
    Berlin: February 26
    New York City: March 11
    Tokyo: Spring 2015
    Seoul: Spring 2015
    Hong Kong: Spring 2015
    Shanghai: Spring 2015
    Bangalore: Spring 2015
    São Paulo: Spring 2015
    Southern Hemisphere Autumn 2015

    Fabric Gets Some Updates

    Since Fabric launched at the October Flight conference, Twitter has made several updates to the kits. For one, they upgraded the beta distribution tool with share links and crash-to-tester identification. This was announced in December. Share links enable you to create onboarding links for each build and invite testers through various media.

    “Within your share link dashboard, you can manage all your links in one place — with complete control over who can access your builds,” explained Jason St. Pierre on the Crashlytics blog. “Share a public link with the press or your investors, or create a private link for internal dogfooding by setting domain restrictions. We also automatically point your internal links to the latest build so your testers can always access the latest from one reliable place.”

    “No need to worry about manually adding new testers either!” he added. “With share links, you can automatically assign new testers to a group when they sign up via your link. This ensures that everyone will receive your updates in the future, as soon as you send them out. On top of that, you can now create specific groups ahead of time based on where you plan to post your links. Organizing testers have never been easier.”

    The crash-to-tester functionality lets you instantly identify the tester who experienced a specific crash from within your crash reports. You can then immediately contact testers for feedback and work with them to reproduce the issue at hand.

    Twitter also added a new self-service app installs tracking feature called Answers. This is available for free as part of Fabric. It provides real-time, optimized app analytics.

    “Answers gave us the analytics to track thousands of installs for free from our mobile app promotion campaigns and helped us meet our cost-per-acquisition goals,” said Greg Schwartz co-founder & CEO of calendar app UpTo.

    “We love having the free mobile measurement solution from Fabric to track both app installs driven by our users sharing content on Twitter, as well as app installs we drove through Twitter Ads,” said Path marketing manager Ana Larue. “This solution gave us the visibility to track the 100,000+ installs we drove via Twitter in November.”

    Organic installs measured by Answers are available in Card Analytics.

    Last month, Twitter also launched theming support for Digits. This lets you make Digits blend into your iOS and Android apps.

    “We understand how crucial your app’s sign-in experience is to growing and retaining your user base,” said Digits engineer Israel Camacho. “Digits can already be launched from any button anywhere within your app to optimize that experience. Now, with theming support, you can match Digits exactly to your app’s ambience so the Digits sign-in flow looks indistinguishable from your app. The look and feel of your background, call-to-action button and select text are all customizable.”

    Finally, in the MoPub Kit, Twitter shipped support for MRAID 2.0 and specification to enable rich media ads in banners and interstitial ad units.

    Expect to learn how to get more out of all of this stuff at the Flock events.

    The Hatch Contest

    Along with the Flock developer event series, Twitter just announced a new contest for startups called Hatch. With this, the company is calling on developers to tell them about their apps, and they’ll pick a winner, who will get meetings with Twitter execs as well as opportunities to meet with potential investors. They’ll also get some funding cash. There will be ten finalists, who will fly to San Francisco to present their startup ideas at the first annual Hatch Gala in July. Here’s a look at the prizes and what it takes to be eligible:

    Submissions for Hatch are open now. The deadline is June 5, which will be followed by the first round of judging beginning on June 8, and the second round on June 15. The finalists will be announced on June 22, and the finalist event in San Francisco will take place on a date in July to be announced.

    Image via Twitter

  • Bump And Flock Are Shutting Down This Month

    Bump announced that it had been acquired by Google back in September. At the time, the company said that both the Bump app and its Flock photo sharing app would continue on. That is no longer the case.

    Bump revealed in a blog post that both apps will be shut down effective January 31st as the Bump team continues working on new Google projects. On that date, the apps will be removed from both Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

    If you’ve already downloaded the apps, they’ll stop working after that, and all user data will be deleted, according to Bump.

    CEO and co-founder David Lieb wrote, “We’ve taken much care to make sure that you can retain any data you have in Bump and Flock. At any point in the next 30 days, simply open either app and and follow the instructions for exporting your data. You’ll then receive an email with a link containing all of your data (photos, videos, contacts, etc) from Bump or Flock.”

    “Over the years, we’ve been inspired and humbled by the millions of people who have used Bump and Flock,” he added. “Your feedback, enthusiasm, and support has brought much meaning to our work, and we want to thank you all for that. In many ways, Bump was a revolutionary product that inspired many subsequent advances and helped push the world forward. We hope our new creations at Google will do the same.”

    It’s likely that as a result of Bump’s refocusing we’ll see some more Bump and Flock-like features coming to existing Google products like Google+ Photos and perhaps Android.

    Image: Bump

  • Social Web Browser Flock To Shutdown

    Social web browser Flock has announced it will be shutting down on April 26, according to notice on its website.

    Flock was purchased by social gaming company Zynga in January for an undisclosed amount. “The Flock team joined Zynga in January, 2011 and is now working to assist Zynga in achieving their goal of building the most fun, social games available to anyone, anytime — on any platform,” the company said on its website.

    Flock-Shutdown

    Flock said users could still use the browser but key features would be disabled after April 26. “You can keep using the product, but its sync and social networking features will no longer work after April 26, 2011, as the servers that bring you those features will be decommissioned. In addition, the browser will not have the latest security and privacy updates made available,” the company said.

    Flock said it recommends users either switch to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. The 5-year old browser had 10 million users globally who were attracted to Flock for it ability to help them manage social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

  • Flock Makes Upgrade To Chromium 7

    Flock Makes Upgrade To Chromium 7

    Social web browser Flock has released a new Chromium 7-based version of its browser on both Mac and Windows platforms.

    Flock says its new 3.5 version offers greater ease of use and faster performance, likely in response to its recently launched competitor RockMelt.  The company says it has reached an installed user base of  over 9.5 million users globally and calls itself “the social browser market leader.”

    Users of the browser can view their social content via a Flock Sidebar, which includes tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn status updates, RSS feeds, and YouTube and Flickr content.

    New Flock from Flockstar on Vimeo.

    “We’re seeing great overall growth in users and engagement, including 57 million new activities conducted within new Flock per day, and over 4 billion activities over the last four months,” said Shawn Hardin, president and CEO of Flock.

    “Our growth is 100% user-powered: 83 percent of our users say they have already recommended or intend to recommend the new Flock browser to their friends and family.”

    The new Flock browser has been cloud-based with an API since June 2010. Flock for the Mac supports Leopard and Snow Leopard OSX and will be available on December 1. The PC upgrade on Chromium 7 will automatically be updated for current New Flock users or can be downloaded.

     

  • Flock Taps Google’s Chromium to Bring Speed and Social to the Browser

    Flock has announced a complete redesign of its browser, originally based on Mozilla Firefox. The new one is based on Google’s Chromium platform (the open-source project behind Google Chrome), and like Chrome, places a great deal of emphasis on speed.

    Of course Flock also places a great deal on what it’s already known for – social media activity from the browser. "Social isn’t bleeding edge any longer-it’s a game-changing, mass market phenomenon," Flock CEO Shawn Hardin tells WebProNews.

    "Over the last year Flock conducted an incredible amount of customer research from one-on-one interviews to focus groups to analyzing anonymous data from millions of users," Hardin tells us. "It is clear that all age groups are now participating in social, and users are trying to balance the enormous benefits of staying connected with their friends while also managing the overwhelming amounts information that’s coming to them everyday. While they love their social networks, they’re seeking better ways to organize and manage the people and content they care about. The new Flock is all about helping users do that and we determined that the Chromium platform was the best platform for us to use in the redesign of Flock."

    Flock Home Page

    Flock has been working with Google’s Chromium team over the last year on this redesign, which is the first major browser outside of Chrome to be released on the Chromium platform. It comes with both the ability to do social networking/media search and social network grouping within the browser. "It will also be faster than IE and Firefox," a representative for Flock tells us.

    With the Groups feature, users can "Channel Surf" the Web, as the company puts it, by switching the view of the scrolling sidebar between the conversations and information they are most interested in at any given time. There is also a "What Your Friends Are Saying" feature that shows exactly that – from multiple social networks.

    Flock Groups - Feature of New Chromium-based browser

    "Our interactions with people online have changed everything about the way we discover, shop, work and play," says Hardin. "The new Flock is designed to naturally complement the value we place in relationships and puts you at the center of your friends and their conversations while you browse the Web. Conventional browsers like Internet Explorer and Safari aren’t built to bring together the conversations and content that matter to each user. Flock is the only browser with the best of the social Web built-in."

    Google is the default search option for the browser, which is also able to tap into thousands of Chrome extensions, as it is based on the same technology as Chrome.

    Flock is already the number one desktop app on Facebook and is ranked in the top 100 most popular of all Facebook apps. It’s also ranked the sixth most popular browser operating in Europe, according to Net Applications.

    The new Flock browser is immediately available for Windows, and can be downloaded at Flock.com. The Mac version will be out later this summer.