Flock 1.0 has finally shipped.
Almost two and a half years ago I met up with Bart Decrem for coffee in Palo Alto. He was working with Geoffrey Arone to build a company to write a new browser. Bart wasn't fully clear on exactly what it would look like or exactly what it would do but he believed that it was important to build a web browser that would break new ground in functionality and experience. He showed me a prototype that showed off two pretty amazing features: really simple bookmarking shared bookmarking and the ability to take pieces of web pages and store them for later reuse. I was excited so I quit my job and joined up.
The first day we were working out of the Bessemer offices in Menlo Park. Beyond Bart, Geoffrey and myself the team included Daryl Houston, Chris Messina, Andy Smith and Anthony Young. Pretty quickly the vision came together. Even though Daryl is the only one of us left at the company the 1.0 product that was just released this week is pretty much what we wanted to build.
In the past couple of years the company has had its ups and downs. There were personality conflicts that were handled pretty poorly (especially by me). There were times of hyper-productivity (I hacked for basically 24 hours straight in a hotel room in Portland to get a feature ready for 0.1) and unproductivity (what did I actually do in the last half of 2006?). But the high-level vision remained clear and nobody working on the product ever doubted that what we were doing was important.