Once again, social networking has proved to be an integral part of our culture. The man who developed Netscape, Marc Andreesen, has developed a new web-browser (available starting tomorrow) called RockMelt. According to an article from Yahoo! Finance, RockMelt “is built of the premise that most online activity today revolves around socializing on Facebook, searching on Google, tweeting on Twitter and monitoring a handful of favorite websites. It tries to minimize the need to roam from one website to the next by corralling all vital information and favorite services in panes and drop-down windows.”
Just like we’ve learned with Clay Shirky, the way people are using tools like the internet is revolutionizing how these tools are used—not the other way around. Andreesen is quoted as saying “This is a change for us to build a browser all over again. There are all things we would have done at Netscape if we had known how people were going to use the web.” For more on his thoughts, here is a clip of him on Charlie Rose talking about mobile technology.
I think that this reflects a significant change in the way people will use the internet in the future. A gigantic shift is moving towards easier “findability”, something Peter Morville advocates for in his book Ambient Findability. By developing a browser that conveniently includes all of these functions in one place allows people to use the internet more easily and efficiently for these processes that the public obviously sees as being the most important uses of the internet. People love their Facebook, Twitter, and Google, and if these sites disappeared I’m not sure that people would be able to easily revert back to the days before we were able to quickly look up, say, Mel Gibson’s filmography and a second later learn what a classmate ate for lunch.
It’s also worth noting that Andreesen also sits on Facebook’s board of directors so I’m sure the synergy of Facebook and RockMelt has more to do with business strategies than public needs. The Yahoo! Article reports that “RockMelt only works if you have a Facebook account. That restriction still gives RockMelt plenty of room to grow, given Facebook has more than 500 million users. After Facebook users log on RockMelt with their Facebook account information, the person's Facebook profile picture is planted in the browser's left hand corner and a list of favorite friends can be displayed in the browser's left hand pane. There's also a built-in tool for posting updates in a pop-up box.”
No internet browser has even been able to outshine Internet Explorer which holds about 60% of the market share, but analysts predict that RockMelt is a serious contender. To check it out, you can visit http://www.rockmelt.com/. Personally, while I do partake in social networking, having it so easily accessible and built into my browser might prove to be more of distraction for me than anything else considering my primary use of the internet lies in work and school. I find myself venturing over to Facebook whenever I’m procrastinating. It’s usually when I’m avoiding tasks for my real life that I saunter into my virtual life. I try to keep the two separate and not stay so connected, but it seems as though I’m a minority in that regard.
You can read the article from Yahoo! Finance on RockMelt here.
-Bridget
Maybe such tools as RockMelt will mean that all of life will become a distraction and it will be hard to concentrate on anything for long. But then again, maybe not. One strategy may be like Bridget to keep our virtual lives in perspective and under control. Possibly that could become the focus of personal development in the 21st c.
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