DownloadSquad and Flock To Close Down
If you are a fan of DownloadSquad (and/or Switched), then I have some bad news for you. Following the merger of AOL and The Huffington Post, AOL has asked Arianna Huffington to shut down at least 30 sites. Among the sites that will be closed down are DownloadSquad and Switched. This means that there will be no news articles posted on these sites.
“More than four years after launching, Switched and DownloadSquad are unfortunately being closed. I've been thrilled to work at these two sites that have expanded tech coverage beyond the usual gadgets and social networks to cooking, culture, design, art and more. It's been humbling to work with these incredibly dedicated and talented teams of writers, and it would have been impossible to do it without them,” said Editor-in-chief Thomas Houston in a post that’s up on DownloadSquad and Switched.
Moving on, if you were also a fan of Flock, the browser that focused on social networking, I have more bad news for you. This January, in a talent acquisition, Zynga acquired the team behind the Flock web browser. What they didn’t acquire is the technology, the Flock.com domain, nor did they bring Flock CEO Shawn Hardin on board. That left Flock in a pretty bad shape – such a bad shape that support for the browser will end come the 26th of April.
“Support for Flock browsers will be discontinued as of April 26th, 2011. We would like to thank our loyal users around the world for their support, and we encourage the Flock community to migrate in the coming weeks to one of the recommended web browsers listed below.,” says an announcement on Flock.com. Underneath the announcement links to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are posted. As you may remember, when Flock was rolled out back in 2005 it was based on the Firefox core; then in 2010 it switched to the Chrome core.
“More than four years after launching, Switched and DownloadSquad are unfortunately being closed. I've been thrilled to work at these two sites that have expanded tech coverage beyond the usual gadgets and social networks to cooking, culture, design, art and more. It's been humbling to work with these incredibly dedicated and talented teams of writers, and it would have been impossible to do it without them,” said Editor-in-chief Thomas Houston in a post that’s up on DownloadSquad and Switched.
Moving on, if you were also a fan of Flock, the browser that focused on social networking, I have more bad news for you. This January, in a talent acquisition, Zynga acquired the team behind the Flock web browser. What they didn’t acquire is the technology, the Flock.com domain, nor did they bring Flock CEO Shawn Hardin on board. That left Flock in a pretty bad shape – such a bad shape that support for the browser will end come the 26th of April.
“Support for Flock browsers will be discontinued as of April 26th, 2011. We would like to thank our loyal users around the world for their support, and we encourage the Flock community to migrate in the coming weeks to one of the recommended web browsers listed below.,” says an announcement on Flock.com. Underneath the announcement links to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are posted. As you may remember, when Flock was rolled out back in 2005 it was based on the Firefox core; then in 2010 it switched to the Chrome core.
