RockMelt's Social Hooks Put Users In Control Of Invite Flow

Capping initial access to one's service has long proven to be one of the most successful ways to drive buzz around the product. Whether limiting the number of users is designed to reduce strain on the system, to reduce initial support demands during the beta period, or just to get people talking about the product as they beg friends and strangers for access, the process of launching a product to a subset of people has practically become second nature - with multiple layers of "beta" evolving. Today's launch of RockMelt is an interesting tweak on the old model, and a first test of the browser's real integration with Facebook as your social engine.

It is not too uncommon for users who gain early access to a product to have a limited number of invites to pass to their friends. You often see a flurry of posts on blogs or Twitter, or pings via e-mail that amount to "Who wants into Service X? I have 10 invites!" or the invites can be given away in a first come first serve raffle system. Alternatively, the service can do a first in and first out approach, whereby the faster you are to register, the faster you get let in behind the firewall, but all flexibility resides with the service itself. This is the "request and wait and wait and wait" method.

RockMelt has created a unique hybrid of the two, worth noting.

The site, if you don't have access, asks you to connect to Facebook, and request an invite. That puts you in the queue - but not one solely controlled by the company.

Once you have made such a request, a friend of yours who already has access to the browser can see that you have asked to get in, and can, through RockMelt, pass you a code that is exclusive for you. This presents an interesting dilemma, especially if demand far outstrips supply.

In my case, as with all standard new users of RockMelt, I was given three invites to hand out to Facebook friends who wanted to take the new browser for a spin. But dozens and dozens had already made the request, meaning I couldn't give out access to everyone I would like to and forcing me to hand pick three - for whatever reasons I felt.

Should I reward close friends? Family? Business colleagues? Partners? A-Listers who I want to impress? The choice was mine alone.

The dilemma is an intriguing one. I wouldn't want to pass along my invite to someone who I thought wouldn't benefit from access. I wouldn't want to pass an invite to a Facebook connection who was a practical stranger. So I made my choices.

Three folks got RockMelt invites, and the rest didn't. Maybe someone else will take kindly to them later. Maybe I'll get more invites. But RockMelt's twist is an interesting one - which will ensure you aren't giving out codes to people you have no connection with. If the graph is truly to be social, a missing link is just a miss.

Crowded Mature Markets Don't Scare Blekko or RockMelt

                              
Two of the most heavily anticipated and visible product debuts in the past month have been Blekko, the slashtag-happy curated search engine powered by humans and fancy algorithms, and RockMelt, the new social-centric Web browser that drags Facebook alongside throughout your page perusing experience. Both took years of development, sport dozens of employees and raised significant capital. Both are intriguing enough to gain curiosity from early adopter tire kickers. And both are raising eyebrows from skeptics who wonder why otherwise smart folks would charge headlong into what are clearly mature markets with many high profile competitors. For every ubergeek checking out the latest toy, there is somebody else wondering if the world needs "yet another" search engine or Web browser.

Short answer: The world always needs new innovation, and there are countless examples of companies entering into crowded markets that needed some shaking up, who found tremendous success - including in these two markets.

Corollary: To consider either Blekko or RockMelt a success does not require either of them to topple the dominant market leader. Blekko is not a Google search replacement in most cases, and Rockmelt won't necessarily have you uninstalling Firefox. If they can get 1%, 5% or 20% of the market, it is significant indeed. (See: Don Dodge from 2007: Why 1% of search market share is worth over $1 Billion)

Google Takes On Crowded Search Market, Firefox Takes On IE

Google's entry into the search market at a time when Alta Vista could be considered the quality leader, with additional players such as Excite.com, Infoseek, HotBot and yes, Yahoo!, may seem like ancient history now, but the company looked at an industry which needed disrupting. It obviously worked. Meanwhile, Firefox emerged, through Mozilla, out of the ashes of Netscape, burned by the overwhelming market leader, Internet Explorer. It's now safely assumed Firefox is the strong #2 to IE, with Google's own Chrome holding the #3 position and Apple's Safari at #4.

One could highlight the opportunity for reinvention of new markets for some time strictly by looking at Apple and Google alone, even though there are many more examples, from big companies and small alike who have looked big brand names in the face and pushed ahead anyway.

Google Reader Emerges to Take On Bloglines

If you read Chris Wetherell's fantastic two part series about the birth of Google Reader, and Mihai Parparita's companion piece about how he joined the team, you can see significant skepticism over whether the world needed yet another feed reader when NetNewsWire and Bloglines did just fine. Reader now is easily the #1 share holder and Bloglines just closed up shop.

Apple Introduces an MP3 Player and a Phone!

In October of 2001, Apple introduced a hard-disk based MP3 music player. The MP3 player, called iPod, launched with competing players like the Creative Nomad Jukebox and Rio's line of digital audio devices already in the space. That they launched an MP3 player seemed like madness. To others, their launch of the iPhone was similarly crazy, even after the iPod's runaway success. Resident curmudgeon John Dvorak warned in 2007 that Apple should pull the plug, adding "It's the loyalists who keep promoting this device as if it is going to be anything other than another phone in a crowded market."

The crowded market had plenty of room for Apple.

One doesn't have to look too far away from this space to find that Google's Android OS took on the successful iPhone, as well as Symbian, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and others, and found opportunity to grow significant market share. Facebook launched into a market occupied by Friendster and MySpace. Gmail was introduced years after Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail had amassed millions of users apiece.

Is it going to be a challenge for Blekko and RockMelt to separate themselves from aggressive competitors? Absolutely. But often, empty markets without participants are empty for a reason - and crowded markets are there because there is potential seen by multiple players. Blekko and RockMelt each now have the opportunity to compete on their merits, and attract their own target users. It's not necessarily a zero sum game, and both seem to competitive enough to bring value, with enough humility to not trip over their own hubris.