The price of the new Chromebook is $499. That’s the same as a Windows laptop, only you can’t run Windows applications on a Chromebook, including office apps, games, or use external devices such as video cameras, scanners, etc.
I thought that we’d see a $250 laptop with a Chrome browser. We’ve ended up with an expensive laptop with a Chrome browser. Put another way, it’s cheaper to buy a $450 Dell Windows laptop and install Chrome (plus you get the benefit of a using Internet Explorer for sites that don't support Chrome!).
If the laptop looked as beautiful as a Macbook Air, I could understand a premium, but it doesn’t. To most people the Chromebook looks identical to a Windows laptop.
The FT have started using a good implementation of a tag cloud on some of their blogs. E.g., if you go to the FT Alphaville blog, look on the right hand side under 'Tags' - and the most commonly used tags appear larger than other text. It's quite useful for browsing and looks quite nice. The FT uses WP-Cumulus to do the tag cloud, which is a free plugin.
However the nicest implementation (which admittedly, is of comments not tags) I've seen is on The Economist. Go to their 'Comments Homepage' and you can see how all the comments posted on to the website relate to each other. Very nice, and pretty guaranteed to find something in there of interest.
Navigation such as tag clouds, or The Enonomist's 'comment cloud', or the BBC's Most Read (again, look on the right hand column of most BBC News articles) lists are an excellent method to promote a longer visit on a website and more pages per visit.
The web started with a browsing navigation style. There wasn't a huge amount of content, so users meandered around the web looking for interesting content. Next came searchable navigation style. Google recognised the explosive amount of content on the web, and we started using Google to search for our data nuggets - deep diving into sites for our specific information, and then moving to the next site. We've now moved back to browsing. We use Facebook Activity feeds to burn five spare minutes, or our Twitter feeds to spend 15 minutes looking for recommendations from those that we're following.
Groupon have capitalised on this - sending out broadcasts to say "Hey, this product is 80% cheaper - why not buy one?" Within two years we'll be back to a search based browsing experience, which will be fine because Google or Bing (Microsoft) will own Twitter by then.
OK, probably one of the oddest names for an application that is supposed to revolutionise social media as we know it, but that's enough about copy writing for the moment.
Rockmelt is a solution to a rumour that has been circulating for a while now - "Will Facebook produce their own browser?" (Note that a number of people think that Facebook will also create their own phone, but that's another article altogether).
Rockmelt is a web browser that is based on Google's Chrome browser, and totally immerses the user into Facebook.
I've been saying for a while that Facebook is become more and more like Compuserve used to be - a "walled garden" of content and applications, which most users never need to leave.
Rockmelt takes Facebook one leap further into that Compuserve model.
Your contacts who are currently logged into Facebook are listed down one side, and updates (notifications) appear on the opposite side.
There are buttons to Share content, and where the search field appears in most browsers combines Facebook search with search engine results.
You can also update your status quickly, and there are other shortcuts to other Facebook functions.
I've been using the browser for one day now, and it is nothing short of really distracting. Sometimes you just want to do some work in a browser (our timesheets and accounting system are all browser based for example), and seeing all this Facebook activity is very distracting.
Then there's the privacy. Normally, I don't have a major problem with Facebook or Google's privacy policy, mainly because I know that it's a 'payment' for using a no-payment service - I give some data, and get some excellent (social) search results in one way or another.
Rockmelt really brings that down to Earth with a bang. When installing the app, it asks the user whether you are OK for Rockmelt to access your Facebook account settings:
Of course, it needs to access lots of settings as described above, so you get the full list of what the app wants to access, and it is pretty scary. I don't know the app authors from Adam, so how can I trust them will all these details about me?
This is something which Facebook and other API platforms are going to have to tackle soon, before data starts leaking out to unscrupulous developers, if it hasn't already.
In summary, I like Rockmelt for being the first social browser. It's an excellent application for my 14 year old nephew, or my wife who both use Facebook for hours a day for purely social reasons. Anyone who uses a browser for work will find it hugely distracting, especially those users who like browsers such as Chrome for it's no-frills simplicity and lack of clutter.
This morning I downloaded the latest version of Microsoft's browser - IE 9. The browser is still in beta version, however we usually download beta versions of browsers to ensure our client sites are ready for the new browsers. (It's like a moving target though, because the browser subtly changes between minor beta versions and you rarely get to hear about a firm date for a consumer launch).
After using IE 9 for the day, and making sure I wasn't swayed by any other reviews, here's my outcome.
When IE 9 loads, it still takes that trademark-long-time. I don't know how Google get Chrome to load so quickly, but that to me is the best feature of the browser. Why do you want to have to wait longer than the fastest browser?
When IE 9 does eventually load (and I'm exaggerating about the length of the load time - it is much quicker than IE 8, but still the slowest out of Firefox and Chrome), it looks startlingly similar to Chrome. The favourite 'star' has moved to the left. The whole top area has moved to one horizontal area, making the actually web page a much larger area. The menus are now three small icons on the right hand side. Even the developer tools look the same as Chrome.
Microsoft will be marketing very hard that IE 9 is much faster at rendering web pages than the other browsers. They have a performance test page set up which I can only assume (but frankly can't be bothered to do) is weighted against it's competitors because Chrome and Firefox are so incredibly slow to IE 9 - more than you would expect from the hardware acceleration.
The sneakiest thing about the new browser though, is that Flash no longer works out-of-the-box. You have to reinstall it at Adobe.com. With Microsoft seeking domination for it's slow-to-get-market-share Silverlight, in effect uninstalling Flash is near brilliance. Or it would be, if IE 9 came with Silverlight working out of the box. I was amazed that it didn't work with IE 9. What an incredible own goal.
I prefer using the Google Chrome browser because I find it faster to launch and then open web pages than any other browser. This morning I was asked to (technically) review a French website, and when I went to the site, Chrome asked me if I wanted to translate the page. The result was much better than I'd imagined.
For example, open Google Chrome, load http://www.lemonde.fr/ and at the top of the page it will ask if you want to translate the page. Click Yes. Note that any of the images which have text can't be translated, and often these types of images are used for buttons to click on. Menus are often written in 'normal' text though - so these are translated.
