RockMelt Makes Browsing a Social Experience

By: Ramy Ghaly

More than 500 million people are on Facebook, and Twitter adds 500,000 accounts a day.

Mountain View's RockMelt is betting big that a lot of them are, and will want to use its social Web browser. Backed by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and made available in March, RockMelt is a new browser with Facebook, Twitter and other applications built in. 

The browser market has been shaken up more as users increasingly access the Web from their smart phones, particularly Apple's Safari on the iPhone.

RockMelt isn't the first or only Web browser to add social elements.

Dubbed the Facebook browser, it's easy to see how it earned its nickname. One of the first steps to using RockMelt is signing in to Facebook and giving the browser permission to access data from the social-networking site. 

RockMelt features a thin vertical bar on the left side of the browser that shows the user's Facebook friends, including the ones who are online and available to chat. 

The two started to look into developing a browser soon thereafter, with Andreessen as an adviser.

By SFGate Via Ctrl-News