The original Kingof social browsers is as good as dead. The Flock web browser will dieon April 26th. Back in January, we told you that Zynga Acquires Flock; May Take Social Gaming To A New Level. As you probably know, Zynga is the social gaming power-house behind Farmville, Mafia Wars and a dozen other popular social games.

What wasn’t expected by many Flock users, was that they’d be abandoned so quickly, without anything to take Flock’s place. I just received my End of Supportletter today. Apparently they made the announcement on April 13th.

Flock said the following it their FAQ:

Flock will no longer be actively maintained, which means you can keep using the product, but key features will stop working after 4/26/11 and over time the browser will no longer be secure as software updates and upgrades will no longer be provided.

Here was one of the immediate responses from the Flock faithful.

David S: This sucks big time! Zynga’s decision to shut down this fabulous browser is an outrage and should be condemned. I have officially boycotted all other Zynga products and encourage others to do so as well. … I curse the day they purchased the property …

Since Zynga has decided to kill the Flock browser, what do they recommend that their users do now? Here’s what they said:

There are many browser choices. We recommend either Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

I think most people expected that Zynga/Flock would work on a new browser that is designed to work with social gaming. All bets are off now, but if you still want to use a good social web browser, I’d recommend Rockmelt, which gives you built-in access to Facebook and Twitter.

While Facebook is getting billions of dollars as investment, one of it’s success stories Zynga (which is worth $5billion too) is ramping up it’s offerings and buying Flock, the social web browser.

Flock, which was initially written on the Gecko engine from Mozilla Firefox and later shifted to Chromium which powers Google Chrome was one of the first browsers which was created specifically for social networking and connecting with people. It now looks like Flock will be a part of Zynga and possibly convert into more of a social and social gaming experience.

TechCrunch has reported the deal and also said that both Google and Twitter were interested in buying Zynga, however, not for the browser but for the engineering talent behind it.

Nevertheless, Flock has not been a huge success, so the idea of Zynga buying it does not makes much sense, unless that Zynga is either planning to integrate their social gaming experience into the browser or are going to use the engineering team to build more social games for users.

Zynga is the company behind popular Facebook games such as Farmville and Cityville. The details of the deal is not known, but it should be anywhere between $50-$200 million. We’ll update when more information becomes available.

The name of this web browser addon tells you who it helps. If you are addicted to sharing cool links or awesome images in Twitter, Facebook or any other social web service, Shareaholic could help.

I tried it out, and it’s helped my sharing output already. Shareaholic supports sending content to over 100 different services.

It’s easy to install and use. Just point your web browser to the Shareaholic home page, and install the plugin. They support Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari, Opera, Flock and Songbird.

Once installed, you’ll be prompted to customize it, so that it shows only the services that you use. Clicking on he Shareaholic icon in your browser will bring up the sharing menu.

You might have noticed from the image above, that you can assign keyboard shortcut keys for each service. You can also use it to shorten long URLs. That’s really handy. I also like the simple posts it creates.

If you need more details, watch this video about Shareaholic.

If you have a sharing habit, Shareaholic is an addon you need to try. It’s a lot easier than going through a twelve step program to cure your addiction.

Install the Shareaholic Addon/Extension

Note: We previously wrote about Shareaholic almost a year ago. You may also want to check out a similar addon called AddToAny.

Flock the popular social browser which earlier ran on the Firefox Gecko engine has dumped Mozilla for Chromium, the popular new browser which also powers Google Chrome.

The new Flock beta browser now runs on Webkit which is also part of Safari and Google Chrome. Flock which has about 8 million users has also landed a new feature where you can create a Flock account and sync your settings to the "cloud".

Users can use the cloud feature to take their accounts to any Flock browser without having to reset it again and again. Considering that most of the other browsers too have an option to sync profiles or at-least bookmarks, it made more sense to have it in the newest Flock beta too. Apart from that Flock almost remains the social browser people have known it to be.

The switch from Firefox code to Chromium will come as a big jolt for Mozilla whose internet browser Firefox’s popularity has been going down since the launch of Google Chrome. Also the team at Flock had initially worked with the Mozilla team on the Netscape project before moving towards creating Flock, so their decision to branch out Flock to Chromium will be even more bitter.

You can download the latest beta of Flock by visiting this page, more info and details are available at the official Flock blog here.

(Source)

Flock the social networking based fork of Mozilla has a much better interface than Firefox, if you are looking to get the same interface to Firefox, you are in luck.

A new experimental theme has been released for Firefox which is based on Flock. The theme looks pretty decent and similar to Flock.

Installing this theme will not bring the social networking features to Firefox, to do that you can check our earlier post: Converting Firefox into a Social Networking Hub.

The theme is compatible with Firefox 3.5.1 and earlier versions.

Download Flock Fox Theme For Firefox

Browsers have grown from being a simple tool to access web pages, to full fledged social networking tools. Flock has been at the center of the social networking world since it’s inception, no wonder its called the Social Networking Browser.

It was quite surprising though to see Flock Gloss, which aims to bring fashion and entertainment right into the browser. Flock Gloss is the world’s first and only fashion/entertainment browser bringing all the scoop and gossip to you.

Flock Gloss aims at keeping you updated with all the latest news from the entertainment and fashion industry, it comes bundled in with several entertainment feeds and sports the pink color, which definitely provides it with a glossy effect.

Flock Gloss borrows several features from the original Flock edition, and adds in features that are only related to entertainment and fashion, it automatically fetches feeds from top entertainment and fashion portals such as InStyle, TMZ, ThisNext, PopSugar and Glam among others.

In addition to the feeds, you can also access media streams of fashion interviews, red carpet events, style shows and more from the browsers Media Bar, you can also easily communicate and share content with your friends.

Well there is no need to tell you the targeted audience for this, so if you love entertainment and fashion, go ahead and have fun with Flock Gloss.

Download Flock Gloss 1.2

Bookmarking is a integral part of your browser and over a period of time you may have collected hundreds and thousands of bookmarks. There are various ways to synchronize and backup your bookmarks that we have already talked about. But the fact that many people do not know the basic way to backup bookmarks from browsers led us to write this post.

In this post we will basically tell you how to backup your bookmarks in Firefox 3, Firefox 2, Internet Explorer, Flock, Safari and Opera. Note you do not need any additional tools to backup your bookmarks with the tips we will discuss in this post.

Backup Bookmarks in Firefox 3

Firefox 3 has a enhanced bookmarking system and that is one of the reasons why we are going to talk about both Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 separately.

To backup your bookmarks in Firefox 3 navigate to the Bookmarks menu and click on organize bookmarks option.

A new bookmark manager window will popup showing you the bookmarks you have. In the new popup window click on the Import and Backup option and select Export HTML from it.

Once you have clicked on the Export HTML option you will be asked for a location to store the resulting html file containing all your bookmarks. Choose a location and save the file in a safe location.

The next time you create a new profile or install a fresh version of Firefox you can simply use the Import HTML option to import your bookmarks into Firefox.

Backup Bookmarks in Firefox 2

Firefox 2 slightly differs from the Firefox 3 method with regards to user interface, in order to backup your bookmarks in Firefox 2, click on the bookmarks menu and select organize bookmarks.

Once you have clicked on the Organize Bookmarks item the bookmark manager window will popup. In the new window from the file menu select Export and choose the location where you want to backup your bookmarks.

After you have backed up your bookmarks you can easily import them back using the import function when you create a new Firefox profile or reinstall it from scratch.

Backup Bookmarks In Internet Explorer

To backup your bookmarks in Internet Explorer navigate to the File menu and click on Import and Export option.

A new pop-up window should open showing you a message saying Welcome to Import/Export Wizard. Click on the next button in the wizard, you will be shown different options to choose from. Select Export Favorites from the list shown to you and click on next.

In the next frame select the root folder of the bookmarks usually named Favorites.

Clicking on next will take you to the final frame where you will be able to select whether you want to export the bookmark to an external application or save to a file. For the purpose of backing up your bookmarks select the option to export to a file or address and click on next.

Once you have done that click on the finish button. Your bookmarks will be backed up to the location your chose. To import your bookmarks back into Internet Explorer choose the Import option.

Backup Bookmarks In Flock

To backup your bookmarks in Flock choose the Favorites Manager option from the Favorites menu.

A new window should open up showing you your bookmarks, in this window select the Export option from the file menu;

A new save dialog show be shown to you when you click on the export option, choose the location where you want to backup your bookmarks and click on save.

Importing is easy too just select the Import option and specify the location to your backed up bookmarks file to restore all your favorite bookmarks into Flock.

Backup Bookmarks in Safari

To backup bookmarks in Safari, select the Export bookmarks option from the File menu.

Once you have clicked on the option you should see a file save dialog allowing you asking you for the location to save the bookmarks. Choose the location you want to save your bookmarks in and click on the Save button.

You can use the Import Bookmarks option in Safari to re-import the bookmarks once again.

Backup Bookmarks in Opera

To backup your bookmarks in Opera browser, click on the Manage Bookmarks option in the Bookmarks menu.

A new tab will be opened showing you the bookmarks in Opera. In the new window from the File menu select Export as HTML or Export Opera Bookmarks option.

A new save dialog should be shown to you from where you can save the file and use it to restore your bookmarks at a later date.

Summarizing

Backing up your bookmarks is quite easy and you can easily do it by yourself without the need for any external tools. Your bookmarks may contain lots of important links which you may have collected over time and losing them could undo quite a lot of work.

To be on the safer side remember to always keep a backup of your bookmarks, better safe than to be sorry.

Do you use any other ways to backup your bookmarks, do let us know through your comments.

Well its been quite a busy day and there were many interesting new things released today, here is the roundup of all the popular software news and releases that happened today.

Yahoo released a new version of the add-on Del.icio.us for Internet Explorer

The new add-on brings on the same experience which Firefox users with the Del.icio.us extension to Internet Explorer.

New Features for Del.icio.us Internet add-on includes;

• Near instantaneous searching with very large accounts (over 10K bookmarks)
• Full del.icio.us sidebar and toolbar implementation with bookmark sync and typedown search
• Toolbar indicators for new network activity and links for you
• Works on IE6, IE7, and IE8 beta on both XP and Vista

Download Del.icio.us add-on for Internet Explorer.

[Delicious Blog] [Img: CC License]

Flock Releases a Beta version 1.2 with Digg, Pownce and AOL mail integration

Flock the popular social browser got even more social with integration of Digg, Pownce and AOL Mail to the already existing integration with Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube.

Here is complete list of Social networks Flock supports now.

• People: Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Pownce, Twitter, and YouTube
• Media Sharing: Photobucket, Picasa, Piczo, Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, and Typepad WordPress.com, and Xanga
• Online Favorites: Del.icio.us and Magnolia
• Webmail: AOL Mail, Gmail, and Yahoo! Mail.

Download Flock 1.2 Beta

[CyberNetNews]

Thunderbird released a new version 3.0 alpha codename Shredder

Thunderbird the popular desktop email client have released a new alpha version 3.0 codename Shredder.

The main changes in Thunderbird Includes

• The new Add-ons Manager (Tools > Add-ons) can now be used to download and install a Thunderbird customization from the hundreds of Add-ons available from our community add-ons website. When you first open the Add-ons Manager, a list of recommended Add-ons is shown. Note that few add-ons are compatible with this early alpha at the time of release, as add-on developers need to upgrade them.)
• The address book can now read data from Mac OS X’s system Address Book, but that feature is currently disabled by default. To enable it, see this blog entry
• New Crash Reporter (Breakpad) to report crashes in Thunderbird.
• Searching bodies of messages no longer produces as many false positives and has become more accurate in some multilingual situations.
• Improvements to our JavaScript engine have resulted in continued improvements in performance.
• On the Mac, Thunderbird is now a native Cocoa application.
• There is a version of the DOM Inspector that works for Shredder Alpha 1, available from Mozilla Add-ons.
• There is a version of the Venkman debugger that works for Shredder Alpha 1.

Download Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha codename Shredder.

[GHacks]

Flock has recently release a update to their social browser which has features such as People in the Browser which allows you to reach to friends from multiple networks and stay connected to them all the time.

You can also now easily share photos and videos, text and your favorite links with other easily.

More than a year and half ago when Flock was first released I had written about using Firefox extensions in Flock Browser. Though the convertor does not work any more you can still access a list of around 1500 Firefox extensions that can be used in your Flock browser.

Official Flock site does not have a lot of extensions, if you want to get the extensions you can browse through the list of extensions which has many extensions which Official Flock Add-ons site.

Well if you are not using Flock you should definitely give it a try and enjoy all the best resources for social networking from within your browser.