Is RockMelt for you?

Last evening the interwebs were abuzz with news about RockMelt, a new browser aimed at the socially aware. I received an early beta invitation (courtesy of Paul Fabretti) and have been playing with it this morning. Is it something you should be thinking about or is it yet one more attempt at redesigning the browsing experience that comes up short?

Depending on how you look at RockMelt, it is either a set of bits and pieces the developers have cobbled to sit on top of Google’s Chromium or it is a ground up build that happens to use Chromium’s open source code. Regardless of what you think or whether this even matters, RockMelt does look different to other browsers in one key respect: it has bars down each side. The left hand bar is dedicated to your Facebook account thorough which you log in (duh?) and your Facebook friends. Crucially, it lets you know who is online, who is ‘idle’ whatever that means, and who is offline. You can see their activity, send messages and the like from within the pop-up and create a favorites list.

On the right hand side it shows your Facebook status by default plus the number of fresh Facebok updates from your network. Since I make extensive use of Twitter, I added that feed along with my LinkedIn group feed. Update numbers for those are also shown. OK – so how is this helping me get things done any better than another browser? You can argue that by aggregating some information coming into the browser that it is saving me from having multiple applications/services open at the same time. If I am a marketing type that spends all day monitoring what’s going on around my brand then that might be a good idea, especially given the premium at which screen real estate comes. RockMelt has attempted to reinvent search such that when you type a search term, it brings up linked suggestions you can access from inside the search results pane. Search is very fast but once I have finished searching there is no obvious way to close the search pane. That’s a glaring omission.

(Click on any of the images to see a full sized version)

Is this all of what I want in a browser? No. As an early technology adopter I’m always going to try something out but in order to convince me of its usefulness, a new product or service has to be demonstrably better than what went before. The fact you can access information from within the browser rather than having to open up new tabs or windows is a nice idea but there are problems.

• First, the panes that pop up are far bigger than necessary. They gobble up a good quarter of the screen.
• Second they overlap anything you might have on the browser. That forces you to close the pane before moving on to the next task. If the overlapping pane forced a resizing of the webpage underneath then I might be able to live with this.
• Third and as Robert Scoble points out, RockMelt requires me to behave differently but equally important is unlikely to get enough attention among the early adopting community. That has knock on effects:

Late adopters usually change their behavior only after getting hounded by early adopters. I’ve seen this over and over. Many marketers think they can work around the early adopters and usually that turns out to be a bad strategy. Can you think of an example of when a new product ignored the early, or advanced, adopters/users, and got major adoption at the mass market without them?

Scoble also talks about the move towards mobile and how RockMelt doesn’t address that market. But does any non-native mobile browser? It will be some years before any of us abandon our laptops and PCs. In fact for many office bound people, that may never happen. So under what circumstances would I be tempted to use RockMelt rather than one of IE, Firefox, Chrome or Safari to say nothing of the many small players that enjoy niche followings?

It is hard to say with certainty. Scoble correctly points out that change is difficult and that in his opinion RockMelt is aimed at slower adopters. He also says he wants his social experience integrated into the browser but doesn’t believe RockMelt hits the spot. I kind of disagree on this last point. RockMelt has made an effort to complete that integration, it just hasn’t pulled it off in as elegant a manner as I would prefer to see. It is clearly aiming at the Facebook crowd – nothing wrong with that – except as far as I can tell, those who live in Facebook do not seem to use the browser for much else. If they’re using a mobile device then there are any number of applications they can use to experience Facebook without having to live with the limitations of a browser on a four inch screen.

There are other limitations. As someone who makes extensive use of Twitter, I am used to having control over how I retweet certain items. RockMelt is a step backwards in that regard. All I can do is retweet without commenting/shortening etc, share on Facebook and reply. No direct messaging and no favoriting although I can watch YouTube videos from inside the popup pane. UPDATE: I stumbled across a way of solving these problems through the way RockMelt handles replies. It’s not intuitive and will take some getting used to.

For me the biggest limitation is that RockMelt cannot take advantage of authenticated data feeds. In short, I can’t easily get my Gmail notifications on the right hand side. Some will argue that email is so 1990s/2000s. Guess what? It isn’t going away any time soon and remains the backbone for doing business in the digital age.

I’d like RockMelt to succeed. I like what it is attempting to achieve and can see definite use cases for marketers. But much as I may wish it well and despite it being a beta release, RockMelt has some major problems. If it can resolve those such that I can easily reduce the number of services that are open in different windows then I will reconsider. Unfortunately it is a long way off achieving that. At least for me.