RockMelt

» see rockmelt.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

rockmelt opened in november 2010 with the same pitch flock had been making since 2005: the browser should know your facebook and your twitter, and the sidebar should show your friends online next to whatever page you had loaded. the difference this time was marc andreessen's name on the cap table and a chromium codebase that actually felt fast. i missed it. i had switched to chrome around 2010 because it was the only browser keeping up with what my work setup needed, and i was not going to install a social network into my taskbar on purpose.

tim howes and eric vishria started rockmelt in 2008 in mountain view with early funding from andreessen-horowitz. the private beta shipped on november 7 2010, invite-only via facebook account. the gimmick was the "edges": a left edge that showed your facebook friends as small avatars with online status next to a right edge that showed your subscribed sites and twitter feeds. you could chat with anyone on the left edge by clicking their avatar, or share the page you were on with one click. it looked good in the demo videos, and tech press wrote it up as the social browser that flock had been supposed to be.

it was not. by 2012 rockmelt had quietly pivoted to a news-reader app for ios, because the browser product had stalled. yahoo bought the company on august 2 2013, mostly for the engineering team. yahoo shut down the browser and the website on august 31. the news app got rolled into yahoo's reader, which had its own death waiting for it later. the rockmelt name stopped appearing anywhere by the end of 2013.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

rockmelt got launch-week press of the kind reserved for products that vcs really wanted to work. tech blogs treated the andreessen connection as a load-bearing signal, since andreessen had shipped the original netscape navigator and was a person whose taste on browsers had once been worth something. the build was clean. the beta felt fast. on a 27-inch monitor the edges were not a huge cost. on a 13-inch laptop they ate enough horizontal room to make the actual web look smaller than it did in chrome.

~ the funny part ~

the social-browser problem is that the social part of your internet moves. in 2010 the answer was facebook and twitter. by 2013 the picture had shifted. instagram had taken the photo side of facebook, while snapchat was on every teenager's phone and the social map kept reshuffling underneath. a browser that hard-coded its sidebar to specific platforms had to keep redesigning every few months to stay aligned with where its users actually were. rockmelt could not run fast enough to keep up.

~ the inheritance ~

what rockmelt was reaching for, the smartphone delivered better. ios and android made every social network its own first-class app, with the home screen replacing the sidebar. chrome added a profile menu and account sync that quietly absorbed the use case rockmelt had tried to own. nothing now ships a browser-with-sidebar-of-friends design. the closest thing is the share menu on a phone, which everyone uses without thinking about whose deck it came out of.

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