If you’ve been feeling like Chrome or IE or Firefox just weren’t social enough, there’s a product for you. Weirdo.
Rockmelt is intended as a social media intensive browser. It’s actually built on top of Chrome and looks a lot like it but with more stuff on the margins to remind you to always be social: the left edge integrates your Facebook friends so you can chat, send messages or check out status updates no matter what site you’re visiting. The right column is meant for Twitter and RSS feeds — both are updated in the background and use “push notifications” to let you know how many unread messages or posts you’ve got piling up. You can update your statuses from both rails as well as share the site you are reading by just hitting the large share button to the left of the search bar.
It’s backed by ultramega tech investor Marc Andreesen.
Of course, targeting something toward social media has been tried before and all you need do is walk by the coffin of Microsoft Kin to see how well it worked out then. I guess Rockmelt could be valuable to people who value social networking at all times and see it as the primary reason to be on a browser.
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