Skip to main content

The Yahoo! offices are pictured in Santa Monica, California April 18, 2011.© Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

The Yahoo acquisition spree continues, and this time Internet giant has acquired social browsing startup Rockmelt.

Rockmelt's apps and website will shut down after August 31, 2013, according to a Yahoo spokesperson. Yahoo plans to integrate Rockmelt's technology, the companies said.

Yahoo paid $60-million to $70-million for the company, according to AllThingsD. Rockmelt had raised more than $40-million from top investors including Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and Khosla Ventures.

Rockmelt, founded in 2009 by top former executives from Opsware and Loudcloud Eric Vishria and Tim Howes, originally started as a social web browser that tightly integrated Facebook notifications and IM-style chat. It also included feeds of news from Twitter and other news outlets integrated into the browser.

That vision of reinventing the web browser proved hard to realize, as it sought to take on entrenched browsers such as Firefox, Google Chrome.

Rockmelt later shifted to a content-consuming website and mobile apps that had similarities to Flipboard. The apps and website focused on consuming content that streamed in tile format and sharing it with friends. Rockmelt had its own "emoticodes" for sharing and commenting on content, such as LOL, WANT, WTF, AWW and HMM.

Yahoo said in a statement on its blog:

"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."

Interact with The Globe