Flock shuts down after ‘sale’ to Zynga, recommends Chrome or Firefox.

Bad news for the social browser Flock. It is shutting its doors after the January sale of the company to Zynga. In answers provided on the Flock FAQ, it is stated that Flock will no longer be maintained. So yes, you can keep using it, but it won’t work after the 26th of April.

Flock was billed as a social browser. Based on Webkit and Chromium, it tracked updates from social networking and media services including MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and others.

Moving over to a new browser? There is at least a section that talks about how to retrieve your favorites and feeds:

1. Click the “Home” button beside the URL bar.
2. Click the “Favorites” tab:
3. Click the “Export” link at the far right of the “Favorites” page
4. Click the “Browse” button to select a file location to export your data to. For feeds, the file format is OPML, which can be imported into Google reader and most standard feed reader applications. Favorites will be exported as HTML, which can be imported into the browser of your choice.

Clayton Stark, Flock’s former VP of Engineering, offered his thoughts on the impending closure.

“Flock was our (development team’s) baby. Especially “new” flock — we cared a great deal about “new” Flock. We definitely had a moment of silence yesterday when that page went up. We took our hats off, and then put our hats back on and went back to work.”

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Stark, who is now Director of Development at Zynga, works alongside most of the team that built Flock. “The revenue performance of Flock was never the stellar part. The stellar part of Flock for us was the innovation potential and the opportunity to participate in creating a new space.”

Stark continued, “When people started to realize that we had a great team and the acquisition offers came in, we opted for the acquisition offers.”

As for what he thinks went wrong?

“I don’t think anything went wrong — Flock was bought by Zynga. I couldn’t ask for a better exit.”

Interestingly, Flock will keep its Get Satisfaction page open, though the FAQ warns that answers will not come from Flock, but rather from the community.