maybe they can get together with kiha and combine their pointless efforts.
RockMelt
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: RockMelt
#22So in exchange for what they say is making my life easier, faster and more social ... they get to log everything I search for, index everything I share, watch everywhere I browse, earn revenue off of my searches, and store it all in their cloud? Yeah ... I'll pass.
My thoughts too, although they address this (and claim they never will) in the techcrunch coverage: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/07/rockmelt-browser-sharing-re...
Re: RockMelt
#23Anyone else peeved that they said WebKit was by Apple?
Re: RockMelt
#24What is it that RockMelt does extremely well? I'm using the beta and I don't see anything. It requires me to change my behavior in terms of searching etc, which I hate. Lastly, Rockmelt is distracting. There is way to much 'stuff' going on. It looks like a nasa dashboard with the Facebook profile photos flashing and icons updating.
Re: RockMelt
#25So... the plain browser experience is okay, but nothing out of the ordinary... I'm not feeling the "social" aspect of it all yet, except for highly sub-par Facebook & Twitter feeds on that right sidebar. And those are too crammed and cluttered to provide a good experience.
I don't want to just use this as a Chrome substitute simple because if I ignore the extra features, it feels essentially the same... I'm not going to give a company so much in terms of data on my activities & potential revenue for so little added value in exchange.
I want to "get" this. But I haven't had my ah-ha moment yet. Will keep trying a bit longer though...
Re: RockMelt
#26I'm a little disappointed. A truly social browser should introduce something social that is intrinsic to the browser itself, not just integrate with existing social sites. A browser should be a basic tool that works equally well for everyone. This browser has Facebook and Twitter built in -- fine for the US/UK market, but what about Europe, South America, and all over Asia, where different networks hold sway? Even if…
Replying to myself (I know, it sends you blind) now that I have my hands on the beta:
This is Chrome. It looks almost identical apart from a VERY distracting list of of your friends' Facebook profile pics down the left hand side, and equally distracting "unread" counts from your Facebook and Twitter feeds on the right.
The oddest thing is that this browser seems to require that you log in to Facebook to start it -- at least, I didn't see a cancel button. The next time Facebook has an outage that's going to be really interesting (also, I can imagine people who work at Facebook QA will confuse the hell out of it).
The bookmarks bar is disabled by default. Instead, your bookmarks are integrated into the "about:blank" page, which is an interesting idea. However, I am a heavy user of bookmarklets (delicious/tumblr/awe.sm), which need to be in a real bookmark bar to be able to work, so I needed to enable the bookmarks bar, a setting which is a little buried.
The Twitter client is activated by hitting the "unread tweets" button on the right hand side. The client is full-featured if a little rough-edged right now -- but if I'm in a browser already, why wouldn't I just have a tab with Twitter's excellent web client open? Likewise the Facebook client. It's maybe saving me one click, but if I have my Facebook/Twitter tabs closed it's because I'm trying to get some work done, so the unread counts don't help.
There are some interesting potential features in here, though. The right-hand side allows you to add feeds for other websites, which is a potentially powerful idea. The integrated sharing tools are extremely slick -- maybe if they provided a way for websites to automatically integrate their own sharing tools I wouldn't miss the bookmarks bar so much.
I'll give it a few more hours, but my initial impressions are mixed at best.
Re: RockMelt
#27Are there really 25 people working on this?
How? It's social plugins with easy APIs on top of a well written WebKit browser.
At least, I assume that's what the footer there is for: http://www.rockmelt.com/
Re: RockMelt
#28I'm a little disappointed. A truly social browser should introduce something social that is intrinsic to the browser itself, not just integrate with existing social sites. A browser should be a basic tool that works equally well for everyone. This browser has Facebook and Twitter built in -- fine for the US/UK market, but what about Europe, South America, and all over Asia, where different networks hold sway? Even if…
Replying to myself (I know, it sends you blind) now that I have my hands on the beta: This is Chrome. It looks almost identical apart from a VERY distracting list of of your friends' Facebook profile pics down the left hand side, and equally distracting "unread" counts from your Facebook and Twitter feeds on the right. The oddest thing is that this browser seems to require that you log in to Facebook to start it -- a…
Sounds similar to the way that Google Chrome OS makes you log into Google to begin. I really hope that mandatory federated authentication doesn't become the norm for everything.
Re: RockMelt
#29We don't need more chrome, more social in the browser. If anything we need less chrome, and more of a sense of workplace management around the types of sites we visit. I'd rather the site dictate my social experience, and let the browser help me work, organize information, and experience my online social ontology without encumbrance.
Here's the biggest problem with Rockmelt:
It assumes I have a singular window to the virtual world, and yet its social experience model of sidebars does not scale well when applied linearly to the way I consume information using browsers.
It's an immediate fail. I usually run maybe two dozen browser windows, each with tabs. The modality of that experience will not map on to how I should consume the social aspects of my online life.
Re: RockMelt
#30We don't need more chrome, more social in the browser. If anything we need less chrome, and more of a sense of workplace management around the types of sites we visit. I'd rather the site dictate my social experience, and let the browser help me work, organize information, and experience my online social ontology without encumbrance.
Here's the biggest problem with Rockmelt: http://plixi.com/p/55680955 It assumes I have a singular window to the virtual world, and yet its social experience model of sidebars does not scale well when applied linearly to the way I consume information using browsers. It's an immediate fail. I usually run maybe two dozen browser windows, each with tabs. The modality of that experience will not map on to how I should co…
Well said Ethan. My browsing habits are very much the same. Several windows, each with related tabs. IE, one for "productivity" with gmail and work-related sites, another window for code-related stuff - usually some stackoverflow searches, et cetera. Don't want each to be cluttered by those two mini-sidebars. Perhaps replace the "blank new tab" page with some of that social stuff as an option.