Apps Edge: Track your favorite apps and feeds
The Apps Edge, like a souped-up favorites bar, tracks your choice websites and services, be they news sites, blogs, Twitter, or your own Facebook page. Numbers appear in each site icon, letting you know how many new entries have been added to the feed since your previous viewing. Clicking an app icon opens up the RSS view in a detachable window. Here, you can preview and share updates and, if you so choose, click a link to open the page in a new tab.
The caveat to the Apps Edge is that the sites you choose to add must support RSS feeds. You can see when your Facebook page is updated, thanks to the tight integration between the browser and the site. You can even toggle the view so that you see only the latest updates from members of specific contact groups you've created -- say, Best Friends or Co-Workers or Family. You can't, however, add your Gmail or Yahoo Mail account to the sidebar for similarly tracking incoming messages.
I would also like to see the RockMelt developers add a way to track "non-Friend" Facebook pages -- such as for organizations or causes -- in the Apps Edge.
Browsing with Google Apps and Docs?
In hooking up with Facebook, RockMelt is geared more toward fun than productivity. But the mashup of browser and website tickles the imagination of what might be. If a company -- say, Google -- were to crank out a version of Chrome that was just as tightly integrated with Google Apps and Docs, then using the browser as your "office suite" becomes that much simpler.
For example, your work Google contacts would be just a click away down the left-hand side of your screen. You could hover over them to see what App they were using or what Doc they were accessing. With a click, you could initiate a chat, no matter which app you happened to have open on your screen.
Down to your right, in addition to (or in place of) the aforementioned RSS feeds, you could have icons representing the Google Apps you use, such as Gmail, Calendar, Spreadsheets, and the like. Given that Google has just integrated dozens of new apps to Google Apps, the ability to hop among them quickly becomes all the more important.