“Our U.S. Hispanic audience will now be able to stay connected to their favorite Spanish-language content and all of their friends using a secure social web browser,” said Kevin Conroy, president of Univision Interactive Media, Inc. “We’re very excited about the unique user experience we’ve developed in partnership with Flock, and we look forward to continuing to deliver the best possible Web experience for our users.”

This free and highly customized social media browser connects users to the most extensive source of Spanish-language content, while keeping them linked to their email and the most popular social networking and media sites. Simple drag-and-drop functionality enables easy sharing of photos, videos, text and more to a friend’s profile on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or other social media sites in Flock’s People Sidebar. Through the FlockCast feature, users can also ‘broadcast’ their public actions to multiple locations at once.

The exclusive Univision.com edition of Flock includes access to news, entertainment and sports feeds, as well as a default Univision.com homepage tab and search capability. The custom social media browser also features “favorite” bookmarks, media streams of popular Univision.com videos and photos, and persistent links to other areas of Univision.com.

There are more than 22 million Hispanics online today and the Spanish-language online market growth will continue to outpace the English-language market growth into the foreseeable future.1 In third quarter 2009, there were nine million global visits to the homepages of Univision.com’s social media properties: Mi Página, forums, and chat.2 More than 40 percent of Hispanics who are active social networkers visit social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis.3

“Univision.com is a leading provider of online Spanish-language content in the United States,” said Shawn Hardin, CEO of Flock. “Flock is excited to expand its offering to serve the preferences of the Hispanic community in the United States, and Univision.com is the ideal partner to team up with to deliver an experience that combines good friends and great content.”

The browser can be downloaded at http://flock.univision.com.

1 Simmons NCS/NHCS Spring 2009 Full Year, Population Adults 18+ (Apr08 – June09); “Online” defined as online computer services, do you use – yes

2 Univision.com Worldwide Traffic Analytics, MRC Accredited, 3Q 2009

3 2008 Forrester Custom Research, Based on Hispanic Adults who visit social networking sites

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For those not familiar with the idea, the general theme of social browsing services is to offer shared surfing and sharing. That might be delivered by a plugin, or be native to the site, and it may or may not included a friends list or broader community recommendations. Often there’s a live element, so you view the same page at the same time as a friend, and lately that’s included a chat functionality as well…and I may have even seen one that included video.

Not all social browsing services are the same, and some are better than others. Me.dium is fairly impressive, and I had a play with Browzmi earlier this year. Although I didn’t write about Browzmi, it was only due to my inability to not completely trash the underlying idea, even if the implementation (which didn’t involve a plugin) was solid.

With Socialbrowse, the only point of differentiation I could spot is that they’ve copied Twitter and added microblogging to the list…because the world lacks microblogging sites, or something like that.

YooNo, a Cluztr or Swarm may result in a Reko, but a Me.dium to well done Slingpage delivered in Browzmi may compete with Flock, but Thatsmymouse isn’t half a Ginza Walk, and even eBay is trying to flog Stumbleupon. PS: that’s only the recent list.

At its root, the idea of social browsing, particularly at a time social networking is more popular than ever and we connect in new and different ways, should be a good idea, at least so you’d think. And yet, StumbleUpon and Flock aside, both of which don’t embrace the shared surfing/ buddy experience typical in many of the others, there hasn’t be a major break out in 10 years. The reality is, people don’t want to surf webpages with other people, not at least in large enough numbers to sustain one of these startups, let alone dozens. Social browsing services are chasing a market that on the whole doesn’t exist beyond a niche play, and most of these services are not going to make it.

What I do find staggering though is that new ones keep popping up, and better still with funding. Are VC’s so bereft of investment ideas that they continue to back one of the oldest ideas in the playbook over and over again? Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?

Social browsing as a new startup idea needs to die. There may room for a small, unfunded startup to sustain something close to a real business, or one or two slightly bigger player from the existing services, but for everyone else, there isn’t room at the inn. Many may have chuckled at the 4th or 5th social browsing startup, but now it’s just getting plain stupid. Enough! Please!

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Improve performance is the obvious difference with the new rendering engine. Flock claims that the new setup will run “complex web applications” such as Gmail and Zoho Office twice as fast.

I’ve long been a Flock fan for the way the Flock team managed to tweak the Gecko engine for improved use of resources. I used Flock for over a year before switching to back to Firefox when 3 was first released as FF3 appeared to have overcome many of the memory issues of FF2, and it was also significantly quicker than Flock 1. The question then becomes: is Flock 2 an improvement memory wise (and therefore more stable) than FF 3?

I’ve only just downloaded 2.0 now (and I’m typing this post in Flock) but it feels quicker from the moment it loaded. Memory use is hard to measure, but with the same tabs open (and Firefox stripped back to a clean install, no plugins) Flock would appear to be using around half the memory of Firefox 3 on non-video content (1.9% to 4.3%) on a MacPro with 4GB of RAM. The addition of an identical YouTube video saw Flock on around 46% vs Firefox 54%. When the video was stopped but was still open on the screen the split went 4.6% vs 10%. Very much anecdotal, but enough that I’m switching back to Flock for the time being to see how it runs.

There’s also the social features which are handy and usually the main selling point of using Flock. Despite being a Flock user in the past I never used them that much, but they are handy to have there.

The downside: Flock hasn’t touched the visuals so it still feels rather cluttered and the washed out theme is still in place. There might be a way of changing this…I need to find out.

If you’ve considered Flock before but have held back because Firefox 3 offered a superior and more shiny offering, now is a great time to give Flock a go. You can download Flock 2.0 beta here.

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Flock is a social web browser built on the code for Firefox. Flock defines itself through integrating various social networking sites and services from within the browser, including MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others.

Flock’s user base has grown 250% since January this year, with revenue rising by more than 400% over the same time period. Flock was named the winner of the Webby Award in the Social Networking category, beating both Facebook and Bebo.

Flock said that the new funds would be used to provide growth capital to expand Flock’s business, including research and development, marketing and expansion into new global markets.

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