The new socially savvy web browser, RockMelt, entered private beta on Sunday and is already becoming a viral web hit, thanks in large part to the Facebook-authenticated invitation scheme it uses.
RockMelt isn’t the first product to try to take on social browsing — Flock, which will also be using Chromium as a base for its 3.0 version, has been trying to crack this nut for more than five years.
Thus, our main question: is RockMelt the answer to finally solving social browsing or is it just another flavor of the month? Let’s take a look.
Journey to a Social Web Browser
There are hundreds of plugins and extensions for the various web browsers, but out of the box, almost every major browser lacks a lot of social integration. Interestingly, Microsoft has actually taken a bit more of a social initiative with Internet Explorer 9. The new ability to pin websites to the Windows 7 taskbar offers one-click access to a site — almost like a single-site browser. These new pinned sites also have social and contextual features. For instance, a Twitter pin can offer a way to check @ mentions, send tweets and more.
Instead of building in social features on the offset, most browser makers are taking the approach of letting companies and individuals create add-ons or extensions to the browser to add these features. Some of these extensions work really well, while others don’t.
There is a very delicate balance between providing social functionality and making the core browsing experience sub-optimal. For end users, the struggle comes in finding add-ons that add functionality without overloading the deck.
It doesn’t help that each add-on can hinder overall web browsing performance. For Firefox, its add-on strategy has actually been a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, it was the extensibility that made Firefox different and valuable. On the other, those same extensions and add-ons are what has made Firefox slower over the years, making browsers like Chrome seem like such a breath of fresh air.
I believe this is incidentally where the Gecko-based version of Flock failed. At the end of the day, there was just too much going on and disabling toolbars ended up just creating a slightly uglier version of Firefox. Flock’s 3.0 beta release looks more aligned with what RockMelt is doing, but there are some differences as well.
A Browser Extension as a Facebook App
I was curious to look at how RockMelt would handle its social tools. Initially, I assumed that, like the beta version of Flock Chromium, RockMelt would use some typical Google Extensions to add on its social layer.
That’s not quite true. Instead, RocketMelt loads a Facebook app every time the browser is loaded, which is what powers the social elements of RockMelt. This is what gives you one-click access to your friends who are online, this is what makes it easy to check your news feed or update your status, and this is the app that can be the cloud connector for the other elements of RockMelt, namely the RSS feeds and the integration of the Twitter API.
This is interesting in that it does actually bring a fully integrated Facebook experience into your web browser. The downside is that, depending on server load, those features might not load in your browser. Or as we’ve been seeing today, if they do load, the browser itself may become unstable because of the Facebook-app/add-on.
Still, when it works, RockMelt’s use of Facebook as its app protocol and connector is a wholly different sort of approach. It’s actually pretty savvy.
Likewise, the way that the Twitter API is used is nice because you can add multiple Twitter accounts to your sidebar and access or send messages from all of those accounts. The sidebar experience is separate from whether you are logged in at Twitter.com, and it all takes place from an API level.
Thus, the featureset is similar to what you would find in a full-featured desktop or web-based Twitter app. That means you can access lists, send and receive direct messages and easily reply or retweet all from the sidebar.
But Can it Blend?
The way that RockMelt uses Twitter and Facebook — and the way that it monitors websites for RSS updates — is pretty interesting and is relatively unobtrusive. You can make sidebars bigger or smaller, or hide them all together.
The Share button makes sending a website to Facebook or Twitter super simple — though an option of posting to both accounts at once wouldn’t hurt.
Still, we couldn’t help but wonder if this is enough. The extensibility strategy for RockMelt hasn’t been disclosed, and this is going to end up being what makes the service either a cool novelty or something really cool.
As of right now, though you can install Chrome Extensions in RockMelt, you can’t easily access said extensions. In fact, it looks like RockMelt has gone out of its way to hide the Extensions feature.
This doesn’t surprise us — other extensions or add-ons could hamper the load and the various JavaScript and server-side storage that RockMelt is using already. However, it does point out an obvious flaw. If you want to do something other than easily connect to Facebook or Twitter, RockMelt is a lot more limiting.
Like Flock, RockMelt runs the risk of being both too heavy and yet not ultimately fulfilling its end goal. What other services can be added — and whether they should be added — is going to be an issue that RockMelt’s developer base is going to have to figure out.
More immediately, the cloud-based nature of its platform means that RockMelt will have to really focus on keeping its servers reliable and capable of handling the load of user activity. A cloud-based strategy is intriguing in that it offers up some really interesting ways to get real-time data and to connect to different services, but it’s still a risk because if the servers or application backend go down, users are left with just a browser.
At the end of the day, we’re not quite sure if RockMelt is the answer to the problem of social browsing, and much of its success will depend on how it addresses the variety of potential shortcomings in the months ahead.
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