Yesterday, a new social browser, RockMelt, launched in a very private beta. You can read my initial review here. But unless you were one of the 500 lucky readers to grab an invite yesterday, or know somebody who did (every user gets three invites), you might have to wait a while before you get to try it out.
In the meantime, you can get a sense of what the browser looks like from this video I shot last week. RockMelt co-founders Tim Howes and Eric Vishria gave me a demo. The demo covers the main ways RockMelt is different than other browsers. The way I think about it is, you can browse with your friends on the left, your favorite sites on the right, and search up top. It is a realtime browser in that you can see when your Facebook friends are online and get notifications when your favorite sites, blogs, and streams are updated with new information.
Some people can’t handle all the notifications. For instance, VC Jeff Clavier wants a leave me the f%$k alone” button, or some way to “turn off all the streams, chats, tweets, etc.” I don’t find it particularly daunting. Maybe he just needs to turn off Growl.
Rockmelt is a social web browser built off of Chromium and boasts deep integration with both Facebook and Twitter with its “Edges” which are filled with friends that are online and feeds that you follow complete with update badges. It also sports what some believe to be the next big search revolution. Unlike Google’s universal navigation field, RockMelt has a dedicated search field that shows complete search results as a drop down overtop web pages. This is helpful when switching...
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