Not Part of the Flock: Browser Revenue Models Suck
I was perusing Facebook like a normal procrastinating college student when I ran across an ad for Flock 2.0. This prompted a bit of googling and I discovered something quite apalling. People actually gave funding to this project!
Before I continue, lets make sure we're all on the same page.
Flock is, to rip straight from Tech Crunch: a "social browser" built on top of Mozilla technology. That is to say it's essentially Firefox with some hard coded extensions built in based around social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.
Now in order to convince suits to give you money for development you usually have to demonstrate some form of revenue model. So how are they making money?
Source: Tech Crunch
To add insult to injury, Flock holds less than 10% of the browser market share so they can't be generating that much money from the deal. Mozilla's agreement with Google "works" because they're throwing over 40% of the world's searching to Google.
How are these investors so stupid as to pay $15 million for a set of extensions? Then again, I have a history of being wrong so maybe Flock is the new hotness and we should ignore the moving trend toward standards compliance and OS-level web integration which essentially means that all this accessibility Flock adds will be negated once Facebook is a cloud application that runs their updates through some sort of active desktop?
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