First Look at RockMelt, a Browser Built For Facebook Freaks
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By Michael Calore, Webmonkey
- November 7, 2010 |
- 1:37 pm |
- Categories: Webmonkey
The rumor mill has been buzzing for months about the imminent arrival of a new “Facebook browser” called RockMelt.
Well, it really does exist, and it’s here. RockMelt is being released as a limited public beta Sunday. Anyone can sign up to test it out, but the release will be throttled so as not to overload the cloud-based components of the app. RockMelt will be doling out download links as quickly as it can manage on a first-come, first-served basis.
The two founders, CEO Eric Vishria and CTO Tim Howes, demonstrated RockMelt to Wired a few days before Sunday’s launch.
It’s based on Chromium, so it inherits Google Chrome’s speed, looks, and basic functionality on both Mac and Windows.
And while its Facebook integration runs deep, RockMelt is not exactly a Facebook browser. It’s a social web browser, allowing you to post links, videos and status updates to both Facebook and Twitter (that’s it for now, but more services will be added later). There are also built-in clients for consuming your Facebook feed and managing multiple Twitter feeds, a chat client, and lightweight RSS reader. It does use your Facebook account to personalize the experience, but its reach is broader than just Facebook.
We’ve seen browsers custom-built for the social web before, most notably Flock, which launched as a MySpaced-up version of Firefox. Mozilla experimented with Ubiquity, an in-browser tool for posting to different social sites and interacting with web services. There are a number of add-ons that can embed social networking dashboards into the browser for you. These tools have grown in popularity as we’ve struggled to manage the ever-increasing flow of links, media and bits shared by our online friends.
So, the idea isn’t original. And RockMelt doesn’t sport a complete re-invention of the browser interface, either. But it is very streamlined, and there are some key elements that people who live and breathe the social web will find intriguing.
First of all, you log in to RockMelt before you use it. You authorize the browser to connect to your Facebook account, and the browser is instantly customized for your social circle, showing your friends and your favorite sites in slim sidebars — or “edges,” to use the RockMelt parlance.
The edge on the left has your picture at the top, and the friends you interact with the most appear in a list below you. To send a new tweet or to update your Facebook status, you click on your picture. To send your friend a message or start a new chat with them, click on their photo. You can also share things by grabbing an image or video on the web page and dragging it on top of your friend’s icon.
The edge on the right has small icons for each of the services RockMelt tracks for you (only Facebook and Twitter for now) as well as spaces to add RSS feeds from your favorite sites.
The “edges” aren’t intrusive — they are less than 50 pixels wide each — but they do add extra visual heft.
“You can’t forget you’re a browser, and you can’t get in people’s way,” says RockMelt CEO Eric Vishra. “We designed these edges to be very thin, to be there when you want, and to blend in when you don’t.” You can also dismiss them with hot keys.
Clicking on one of the icons in the right edge — either Twitter, Facebook or a website icon — brings up a little pane that shows recent posts and activities from that source. Following the “keep things out of the way” philosophy, these panels can pop out from the browser to float freely if you want.
All of your user data is stored in the cloud by RockMelt (on Amazon servers) and synced when you log in, so no matter whose copy of RockMelt you’re using, you see your own custom version of the browser. Others are moving in this direction, too — Chrome connects to your Google account and Firefox has an agnostic Account Manager. But RockMelt’s Facebook integration is central to the experience.
As much as I want to hate Facebook, I actually like this idea. I think the search bar feature is the coolest part though. If they made it so you could see search results just by rolling the mouse over the list instead of having to click each one it would be even better.
Looks good to me.
I gotta admit, that’s really cool. I love how integrated it all is. Although my reading of the article was distracted by the self-realization that I guess I am a facebook freak.
It does look cool to facebook freaks. All this new check in feature and making people check in by offering deals and now this. This social media is blown out of proportion. Rockmelt is another creepy version of checkin. It just shows they just want people stuffed into computers. More I see less I want to use facebook. I have already stopped updating my status. bye bye facebook, twitter..I don’t want to share anything. If I need to I will call my friends.
Wow just think every site will have its own browser. What is the point of the WWW if you need some special program to use it?
They should have implemented the whole thing server-side and then you could do all of this stuff in a standard browser.
Seems like a very complicated way to make something that could be done through a simple browser plugin.
They should call it FaceMelt.
Is anyone else ready for the social networking disease to collapse in on itself?
I’ll give ‘er a shot.
RockMelt? Who comes up with these lousy names?
SocialBrowser. There. I just came up with that. Feel free.
This is again a old wine in new bottle , pushing us back to the AOL Browser walled Garden days. Now its Facebook/Google/Twitter walled garden.
I would appreciate some innovation not be treated to hype of the day.
All I ask just build that has the following
(1) Respect my privacy and do log my websites
(2) Fast browser
(3) small foot print on laptop
(4) Consume little resource
(5) Stop profiling me and my web habits and finally
(6) clean interface
boo
Yet another browser… yeah, that’s what we need like we need another flavor of linux. How about a plugin instead?
Should have done some more research before posting. Flock did start as a Mozilla based browser a few years ago, but for the past 6 months or so has been built on Chromium. I’m not seeing any features in RockMelt that Flock doesn’t currently have, and it’s a very solid browser. Now I stopped using it about a month ago, but it didn’t have to do with any problems in the browser, I’m just not really using Facebook or Twitter very much right now. I’d highly recommend giving Flock a try.
Google Chrome with widgets, I don’t see anything special here. Next.
Andreesen is wasting his money again.
Yawn.
mmmm … tuna melt
I wonder who posted the first three comments. This idea is probably fit for a hobby project. Dunno how they got the moolah to start a company based on this idea alone.