The latest start-up to get a big boost from Facebook’s brain power and cachet is RockMelt, a “social” web browser that has functions like chat and a friends list built in.
The two companies announced a partnership Tuesday that brings Facebook features into the frame of Rockmelt’s browser, similar to a Google search box, so users can now make friend requests, chat, or send messages to their Facebook contacts no matter what site they’re visiting on the web.
Though Facebook is not investing any money in RockMelt, Facebook initiated the collaboration and devoted months of engineering time to it.
It’s “a match made in geek heaven,” said Ben Horowitz from venture capital firm Andreesseen Horowitz, which has backed both companies.
“Facebook brings us the people-centric Internet and Rockmelt is the people-centric browser,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine a more logical deal.”
RockMelt is not the first social web browser to hit the scene – a previous attempt to build one produced Flock, which was acquired by Zynga and then discontinued this past April. RockMelt founders say building on top of Google’s open source Chromium source code has helped them differentiate their browser and that they have the power of timing on their side.
“How many search engines were there before Google? At least a dozen,” said Eric Vishria, RockMelt’s CEO. “How many social networks before Facebook? So many. The market has to be ready and then you have to execute really, really well.”
A partnership with the kings of social at Facebook certainly can’t hurt. A top Facebook executive, Jonathan Heiliger, was among the first 100 RockMelt users, before the browser even launched publicly. He told Mark Zuckerberg about it, which led to some initial conversations between the two chief executives, and now an intensive “five times a day kind of collaboration,” Mr Vishria said.
In addition to building Facebook features into the latest version of the RockMelt browser, Facebook actually altered how facebook.com appears when users land on it in the browser: the icons for friending, messaging, and notifications are missing from the page (they are instead embedded in the top bar of the RockMelt browser), and chats initiated on facebook.com open up in the browser, rather than Facebook, and stay open as users navigate to other pages.
“Our goal isn’t to rebuild the web inside Facebook,” said Ethan Beard, Facebook’s director of platform partnerships. “Our goal is to make it easier for Facebook users to bring their friends with them as they browse the web.”
Mr Beard said Facebook chose to work with RockMelt because of its focus on social, but said the company is open to partnering with browser giants like Mozilla, Microsoft, and Google.
“We would be excited to work with any and all browser manufacturers to make them social,” he said.
RockMelt is still tiny, with only a few hundred thousand users. But 56 per cent of them are 25 and under, and 81 per cent of them are 34 and younger, meaning once RockMelt builds its user numbers and is ready to make money, it could become rather attractive to advertisers. One possible revenue stream for them could be partnering with search engines and taking a cut from search ads users click on in the browser, Mr Vishria said.
