RockMelt Offers a Browser for Social Networking

There have been smartphones, an iPad magazine, and digital cameras designed specifically for social networking. Now a start-up has released a browser optimized for that popular activity.

During the weekend, Mountain View, Calif.-based RockMelt announced the limited beta availability of the new browser. It's built on Chromium, the open-source project that underpins Google's Chrome browser. The company said the new browser "enables you to interact and share with friends on Facebook, Twitter and other sites instantly from anywhere on the web."

'Does More' Than Navigating Pages

The company was founded two years ago by Tim Howes and Eric Vishria, and is backed by Marc Andreessen, who, as the developer behind Netscape, knows something about browsers. Howes, the chief technology officer, is a former Netscape executive.

Other backers include Bill Campbell, an Apple Board member and former CEO of Intuit; Ron Conway, a key investor in Google, Facebook and Twitter; and VMware cofounder and former CEO Diane Green.

Friends are directly available through the browser, so chatting, sharing a video, or keeping up with news updates are relatively quick. Sharing is also built directly into the browser, providing a one-click ability to update a status, tweet or share content. The company said this avoids having to copy and paste web addresses or deal with various sharing widgets on different sites.

Icons for social-networking sites and services appear on one side of the browser, and feeds from those sites and services are displayed in a layer over the main browser. Friends' icons appear on the other side, and sharing can be accomplished by dragging and dropping.

Push Notifications

The company also said RockMelt is the "first browser with push notifications." This allows it to track favorite sites, providing alerts if new information is posted, such as when a new item, picture or video is posted by a friend. Open application programming interfaces will allow integration with services and add-ons provided by Facebook, Google, Twitter and others.

There is also a new approach to search, which, the company said, enables a user to reach "the right search result radically faster." With the same results and suggestions as a regular Google search, RockMelt lets users flip through the pages rather than just click back and forth through URLs.

The business model for the new browser is based on advertising related to web searches. Additionally, interaction with the social-networking sites will be through the RockMelt-run cloud, which will allow the company to acquire a user base since users must register and log in. Capturing a large market share is going to be very challenging, but the company's technology could make it a prime acquisition target.

RockMelt is not the first browser designed specifically for social networking. That distinction falls to Flock. Released three years ago, it has never achieved a large following, arguably because it was released before the social-networking craze really got going.

Posted in: Technology