My initial thoughts about RockMelt Social Browsing

I listened to Robert Scoble’s video interview with the RockMelt team and decided to give it a try. While it is hard to get access at this point I was fortunate and I have been trying it out. Before sharing my thoughts, however, give a listen to Scoble’s interview.

Yes, RockMelt is betting that it can build a new web browser that the masses will, in time, choose to use instead of Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and the dozens of others that currently exist. While this is a long shot it is worth paying attention to RockMelt for several reasons:

• It is backed by heavyweight investors who understand the web browsing world.
• It is taking a very different approach, making Facebook and the social web an equal part of your web experience. It goes so far as to require you to login to Facebook to enable the full RockMelt experience.
• It is the fastest web browsing experience I have had in a long time.

I can see RockMelt becoming an important part of how I work. The speed and built-in sharing abilities are appealing and, at least for Twitter, the best integration I have seen so far. However,

• It is an early-stage product and it crashes every hour or two even if I am not using it.
• While Facebook is front and center to RockMelt it does not support posting to pages, at least not that I can find. Since my use of Facebook is primarily business driven, posting on Facebook pages, this is a major drawback.
• It lacks any mobile or iPad integration. The RockMelt team is focused on a great desktop application first, which is critical. However, give me something for my iPad, please. When you do, however, it has to be better than Flipboard or I will not use it.

In my opinion RockMelt appears to be trying to become the middleware and front-end to the internet. If it can create a rich marketplace around the core browser (it’s built on Chromium so this is very possible) it has a chance.

John

Originally posted on Government in Action.