RockMelt Launches Social News Reader for iPad

RockMelt, the social web browser, released its first app for the iPad on Thursday, but at first glance, you might not realize that it's intended for searching online.

Rockmelt's iPad app blends the most fundamental feature of a browser (search) into what looks and feels like a more traditional news reader application. When you open up the app, the main page is populated with previews of articles from publications that you've selected to follow, as well as articles that have been shared by people you're connected to on Twitter, Facebook and within the RockMelt community.

The search bar sits at the top of the page, ready to be used whenever, but it's no longer the focus of attention, nor is it really the main function of the app. Compare that to the main page of Safari, the default app for searching the web on the iPad, where the only elements on the page are a URL bar and a search bar. The only reason you open Safari is to search. With RockMelt, you can consume plenty of news without ever typing in a website URL or keyword, but the option to search is always there.

Eric Vishra, the co-founder and CEO of RockMelt, argues that most browser apps released so far for tablets have been "uninspired" because they are essentially just "literal translations of the desktop browser." Safari, Chrome and others rely on the search/bookmark formula, just as they do in their desktop versions. Dolphin Browser, another popular web search app, lets users create a Webzine of their favorite publications on the main page, but this essentially serves as a glorified bookmarks feature.

What Vishra and his team have found since RockMelt opened to the public in 2010 is that users click on their bookmarked websites dozens of times a day (27 times a day, on average, per user), so why not surface more of that content when the user first opens the browser? "Users visit the same stuff over and over," Vishra told Mashable. "Why isn't the browser smart enough to have that ready for me?"

The danger (and the potential) of RockMelt launching an application that serves as both a news reader and a web browser is that it now has to compete in multiple categories at once. After playing with the app for a few days, I found the app to be better than many of the news reader applications out there.

With RockMelt, you can compile a comprehensive feed of all the news you want to follow and filter it by genres like Foodie, Finance and Shopping, which makes it easy to browse the latest news from your favorite sites in real time. RockMelt caches full articles from more than 1500 publishers automatically, so you'll be able to click through and read many of the links that pop up in reader view (seen above) even if you lose your Internet connection, a useful feature. And RockMelt users can share quick feedback through tags at the bottom of each article, which makes the experience of consuming news that much more social.

The search function, on the other hand, can be a little inefficient and takes some getting used to.

As you can see in the screen grab below, when you search for a term like "iPad," it pulls up a series of boxes with suggested Google search terms, as well as articles from your feed that mention the keyword. If you're looking for breaking news about the iPad and follow a few tech blogs, this may get you all the information you need. If you're looking for an older story, or to shop for something iPad-related, it probably won't.

In the latter case, you'll either have to take a few extra steps — type the word, find the most relevant box and then tap that box to view the results in Google — or you can type in "www.google.com" in the search box and do a more traditional search that way. Just make sure to include the "www" first — for some reason, it won't load the webpage otherwise.

The app is only available on iPads running the latest version of iOS 6.