A Quick Look at the RockMelt Social Media Browser (in Beta)

If you have a social media pulse at all, you know how many new must-have tools appear on the marketplace seemingly every week. RockMelt caught my attention last week because it promises something unique, a streamlined approach to browsing, search and social media engagement. What I like most about HubSpot is the integration of blogging, seo, social media, lead capture and analysis. Without HubSpot, you have to do all of those things with diverse tools that may or may not communicate with each other. Now RockMelt offers Web browsing, search, bookmarking, social sharing and both rss and social media feeds all under one roof. I applied for and received a beta invitation, so let's take a look under the hood.

The Idea

Founded by Marc Andreessen, of Netscape fame, and backed by his venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, RockMelt is no fly-by-night startup. Built on top of the open source Google Chrome browser, RockMelt doesn't try to reinvent the browser itself, just the user experience. The RockMelt browser lets you connect to your Twitter, Facebook and other feeds and monitor them in sidebars while you are browsing. In other browsers, you have to switch between tabs to see these views. A nice feature is that RockMelt automatically imports your Firefox bookmarks on installation. It's easy to setup and get started.

The real power is in sharing. Now you can quickly share any blog post or video across your networks via a single share button without clicking on different sharing icons and opening up new tabs or pop-ups. This really streamlines the process of finding and sharing content, which is one of the most important parts of inbound marketing. You can also quickly send out a tweet or a Facebook update via the upper left hand avatar-button. Think about all of the things you do in Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader rolled into one. Add to that a powerful and easy search engine (powered by Google), and you have a real potential player in the browser market.

Pros

• RockMelt integrates social media and web browsing
• RockMelt is fast and appears to be solid (in its beta release)
• RockMelt is easy to use, not much of a learning curve
• RockMelt is great for inbound marketing, i.e. finding and sharing

Cons

• I will miss my Firefox plugins, especially Firebug! Get going API developers.
• The left bar is dedicated to my Facebook news feed. Hmmm, not so sure about that. I'd rather be able to pull up a Twitter list feed.
• For now, you can only use RockMelt from one user account. If I could grab Hootsuite and merge it into RockMelt, we're talking marketing miracle. Maybe this is coming... I hope so.
• The other thing I might miss is the real-time updating on Tweetdeck. Maybe this is coming too... I hope so.

Bottom Line

I know we are all busy and have no time for trying out new stuff. But if you're really trying to save time and streamline your inbound marketing activities, RockMelt is worth a look, and not just a quick one.

What do you think about RockMelt?