Yahoo Acquires Rockmelt Social Browser, Apps to Shut Down Soon

Yahoo is not stopping from acquiring companies nowadays, and this time the internet giant has acquired Rockmelt social browser. Reportedly the value of the deal is around $70 million and it will help the company to improve its overall content discovery mechanism.

Under the leadership of Marissa Mayer Yahoo has been spending quite aggressively in order to bring back the lost glory of the pioneer of the internet. Now Mrs. Mayer has extended her shopping spree by successfully acquiring Rockmelt.

Rockmelt is basically the proud makers of a fairly popular social browser that mainly specialized in complete social media integration. Yahoo is mainly focusing towards the youth section in recent times, and social media is one of the easiest ways to catch the attentions of the youths. Earlier Yahoo acquired several other start-up companies like Qwiki, PlayerScale, Tumbler, and a few more.

Rockmelt started its journey in 2010 as a dedicated browser that can be used for all the social media purposes. It has all the needed social sharing options to help the users to easily share their beloved contents via their own social profiles. This means with the help of this you can share stuffs of your choice with your friends via Facebook or Twitter with just a single click or so.

The social browsing start-up very recently published a blog post to state that all of its apps and associated web products will be shutdown on August 31, 2013. The company has even suggested their coveted users to export all sorts of data or information via the designated built-in export button of each app before the doomsday. However, the terms and conditions of this buy out were not disclosed yet by any of the engaging parties.

Tim Howes and Eric Vishria, who are the founders of Rockmelt, have written a informative blog post together. They added, "Yahoo! and Rockmelt share a common goal: To help people discover the best content from around the web."

It has to be added here that in April 2011, the start-up had to shut down its browser to revamp itself as more of a regular content aggregator. It has a very useful news app which provides all the popular and trending contents around the web world and along with that it offers basic browsing functionality too. Unfortunately the company didn’t able to hold the users as the users were not coming back to the site after trying it for the first time.

A senior editor at AllThingsD Kara Swisher reported that Yahoo paid somewhere between $60 million to $70 million for Rockmelt acquisition. Yahoo has already announced that it would eventually integrate the company's key technology its own products and services to make them even better and much more user-friendly. Prior to the buyout Rockmelt had roughly raised more than $40 million from several top investors such as Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and Khosla Ventures. But this could not be able to help the company to gain significant consumer traction. 

In its early days Rockmelt tried its level best to take on popular web browsers like Firefox, Google Chrome etc, but it failed to do so. Later it shifted its prime focus to mobile apps and content-consuming. We can say that it is like a combo of Digg and Flipboard with a few extra cool features. Interestingly the company had its own ‘emoticodes’ too, which were developed to make the sharing and commenting procedure much more interesting.

Yahoo too has published a blog post to admit this Rockmelt acquisition. In the blog it said, “The parallels between Yahoo! and Rockmelt are obvious: we share a common goal to help people discover the best personalized content from around the web. We can’t wait to integrate the Rockmelt technology into our platform as we work to deliver the best experiences to our users in new and exciting ways.”

Final Words

As Yahoo now acquired Rockmelt social browser, we can expect that very soon it will come up with some more useful products especially for the youth section of the world. How will you judge Yahoo’s this aggressive buy-out plan? What are your thoughts on this topic? Please feel free to share them with us.