Flock's demise is also perhaps not so surprising considering that their staff were bought up by Zynga in January of this year and are now "working to assist Zynga in achieving their goal of building the most fun, social games available to anyone, any time - on any platform".
Zynga is best known as the brains trust behind social gaming sites such as Farmville.
Flock positioned itself as the 'social browser' when it first appeared on the scene and was based on the Mozilla platform before switching over to Chromium last year.
Flock grew to more than 10 million users and became the #1 most popular desktop application on Facebook before the talent acquisition by Zynga (the acquisition did not include the technology, service or then CEO so Zynga never owned Flock.com and had nothing to do with today’s shutdown).
Jennifer Van Grove of Mashable, writing in USA Today, says:
Flock is a casualty of the social nature of the Web and Facebook's Open Graph initiative. Web denizens now carry their social graph with them via Facebook and not through the browser. Its shutdown also calls to mind the rise and fall of the once great Flip video camera, which is also being discontinued.
