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I am trying to find out what problem does Rockmelt solve. Does anyone know seriously? I found this in an article of theirs: "This feature, called Save Search,

I am trying to find out what problem does Rockmelt solve. Does anyone know seriously? I found this in an article of theirs: "This feature, called Save Search, will essentially let you make your query results persistent. “We have a patent on this,” says Howes." So is it that they allow you to persist your queries?

smacktoward 13y ago
The original problem Rockmelt was supposed to solve was having to go to a bunch of different sites to manage all your online social activity. The idea being they'd take Chromium and integrate popular services directly into the browser chrome. It turned out that nobody actually wanted a browser with social services integrated into the chrome, though. Which should have surprised nobody, since that exact same idea was behind Flock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_%28web_browser%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_%28web_browser%29), another social-integrated browser startup (this one building its product on Gecko) which predated Rockmelt by five years and which nobody wanted either. Apparently Rockmelt managed to find some VCs who either hadn't heard of Flock, or who thought using Chromium instead of Gecko would lead Rockmelt to succeed where Flock failed. Ooops. (Like Flock, when the "social browser" idea failed, Rockmelt began a series of pivots to try and find something else that wouldn't fail as badly. Also like Flock, they never quite found it.)
- nashequilibrium 13y ago
  "The original problem Rockmelt was supposed to solve was having to go to a bunch of different sites to manage all your online social activity." Thanks, so they needed 40mill to develop and test a value hypothesis. This was very expensive but Yahoo's $65mill covers the cost so at least everyone comes out on decent ground.
- hga 13y ago
  You're possibly over harsh here, "social" today doesn't mean the same thing, and itsn't in the same position it was, 5 years ago. Hmmm, before I'd invest in this I'd like to see research on how many people are seriously engaged in more than 1 and more than 2 social networks. And I'd seriously wonder if that changed for the better in 5 years.
- nashequilibrium 13y ago
  As Andreessen says, “Computing is going to vanish into panes of glass. In the future you’re going to just assume that every pane of glass is a touch computer and it’s connected to broadband. If it’s not active, you’ll assume it’s broken.” And he’s betting that when we reach this world of panes, we’ll be accessing the web via RockMelt."

smacktoward 13y ago

The original problem Rockmelt was supposed to solve was having to go to a bunch of different sites to manage all your online social activity. The idea being they'd take Chromium and integrate popular services directly into the browser chrome. It turned out that nobody actually wanted a browser with social services integrated into the chrome, though. Which should have surprised nobody, since that exact same idea was behind Flock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_%28web_browser%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_%28web_browser%29), another social-integrated browser startup (this one building its product on Gecko) which predated Rockmelt by five years and which nobody wanted either. Apparently Rockmelt managed to find some VCs who either hadn't heard of Flock, or who thought using Chromium instead of Gecko would lead Rockmelt to succeed where Flock failed. Ooops. (Like Flock, when the "social browser" idea failed, Rockmelt began a series of pivots to try and find something else that wouldn't fail as badly. Also like Flock, they never quite found it.)

nashequilibrium 13y ago
"The original problem Rockmelt was supposed to solve was having to go to a bunch of different sites to manage all your online social activity." Thanks, so they needed 40mill to develop and test a value hypothesis. This was very expensive but Yahoo's $65mill covers the cost so at least everyone comes out on decent ground.
hga 13y ago
You're possibly over harsh here, "social" today doesn't mean the same thing, and itsn't in the same position it was, 5 years ago. Hmmm, before I'd invest in this I'd like to see research on how many people are seriously engaged in more than 1 and more than 2 social networks. And I'd seriously wonder if that changed for the better in 5 years.
nashequilibrium 13y ago
As Andreessen says, “Computing is going to vanish into panes of glass. In the future you’re going to just assume that every pane of glass is a touch computer and it’s connected to broadband. If it’s not active, you’ll assume it’s broken.” And he’s betting that when we reach this world of panes, we’ll be accessing the web via RockMelt."