RockMelt For iPad: A Browser Built For Touch That Turns The Web Into A Feed So Content Comes To You
Surfing the Internet can feel like you're running in circles, constantly checking your favorite sites for updates. The RockMelt team believes that content should be delivered, not hunted …
Context & Ripple Effects
RockMelt has been building toward this since its Andreessen-backed social browser debuted in late 2010 under CEO Eric Vishria and CTO Tim Howes: a browser whose premise is that content should arrive via your social graph rather than be hunted down site by site. The iPad version pushes that thesis onto the device where it matters — the iPad was already generating more web traffic than the iPhone and roughly 97% of tablet traffic as of late 2011.
The launch lands in an already crowded feed-on-tablet field: Streamglider went after Flipboard and Pulse with its own social news reader in December 2011, and TechCrunch argued back in July 2011 that the iPad was built for something like StumbleUpon's serendipity-driven app. RockMelt's angle is to collapse the reader into the browser itself, betting the feed layer belongs at the top of the stack.
First-order effects
- RockMelt now competes directly with Flipboard, Pulse, and Streamglider on the iPad, but from the browser layer rather than as a standalone reader — users get one app for both browsing and fed content.
Second-order effects
- Publishers whose traffic depends on repeat direct visits face another intermediary deciding what surfaces, extending the pressure that dedicated readers like Flipboard already put on homepage-centric distribution.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the browser stops being a neutral window on URLs and becomes a curation engine — the same trajectory later described as the browser acting as an agent runtime, where software fetches and filters content on the user's behalf.
The trend: Browsers and feed readers are converging on tablets, with the delivery-of-content model displacing destination-site browsing as the default way people consume the web.