Blackbird: The African-American Web Browser

by GreasyGuide on December 7, 2008

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There have been many attempts to tap into the “black web.” Several African-American search engines, several African-American Digg.com clones, and now we have Blackbird which is the African-American web browser. Chuck from Allhiphop.com hipped us to the web browser earlier today so we decided to take it for a spin. We currently have Google Chrome installed as our default web browser.

So the first thing we noticed upon booting up the web browser is the news ticker. The browser pulls in news content from Google News that might be of interest to African-Americans. Ok no big but no biggie here. Then we clicked on the Video tab and where taken to a section with video content from some online TV sites we have never heard of. UptownLiveTV, NSNewsTV, DigitalSoulTV, ComdeyBanksTV…(who they be?), and a few other channels offer but video content. But I guess they are just getting started. Plus clicking on the video tab also brings up a lower lefthand corner advertisement with your video viewing experience. No pork on my fork…no extra ads in my web browser.

The Give Back tab brings up non-profit and volunteer opportunities which seems to be pulled other from the Blackbird editorial team. I think this is a nice touch content wise but not a major game changer. I’d like to see this flushed out a bit more and offer up a lot of non-profit listings.

The Share/Most Shared tabs requires you to login and share content with the community. So you can share content with 1 button click. You can share a video, blog post, or other content that you think the community might find interesting. Cute but not a game changer.

Our verdict on Blackbird:

Blackbird is cute in theory…but as a business model I don’t understand why any business would want to compete with Windows IE, Google Chrome, FireFox, and Opera….but we’d like to know more. I’d love to hear why they entered into the browser space, their plans for distribution and adoption, community building, and retention. But for now there is nothing within Blackbird that would make me want to switch over and make it my default browser. I switch to Google Chrome because A) I can search right in the main address bar, and B) it’s BLAZING fast at rendering a webpage.

Things that would make Blackbird more interesting would be easy access into other sites like Twitter from within a portion of the browser, an attached social network, a way for bloggers to help build out the community and distribution of Blackbird by being featured content within the ticker in exchange for promoting the browser, and kills the ads.

For now it feels like a skinned version of FireFox. Maybe it would be cool if they even asked artist to come up with custom designs, themes, and layouts for the browser…and some kind of music integration, exclusive content would be a nice change of pace.

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  • I got a question:

    Why is it every time we get something,

    Whitefolk always try to look for a way to take it???
  • Indeed, Blackbird's concept of a browser tailored towards a community is nothing new. The Flock "social browser" (which we're fans of) offers some appealing integration with social networking and webmail services, and even built-in tools for blogging and photo sharing. A spinoff of Flock, called Gloss, also offers similar custom tools and Blackbird-like content customizations for women. "We call it an 'identity browser,'" Young explained. "I could make a browser for the lovers of WarCraft. Would that be exclusionary of other people? No, I would just be bringing those people closer to the sites and resources that they are probably interested in."
  • Frank The Tank
    NO WAY!

    If white people did this, every black person on earth would be up in arms over it. How's that for a double standard? They always want to be different, want to be split off from everyone else. Well then, if that's what they want, then Ship 'em all back to africa. ALL of them. This is retarded!! And so are the retards that came up with this idea.
  • Jay
    More racism. Yay. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, just to name a couple, would love this. Keep separating yourselves more. Because that's what MLK would have wanted, right? You want equality? Stop doing stupid crap like this.
  • Cristin
    BLACK PEOPLE DON'T NEED A SEPERATE EVERYTHING DAMN. News is news is news especially when you consider the fact that anything that would be considered exclusively "Black" is usually a bit on the militant side and commercial sites are afraid of those subjects so what's the point?!

    PLUS, you are forced to injest someone else's perception of black which means, Oprah, Young Joc, and SouljaBoy with a lil Jesse Jackson here and there. Anyone who's AOL page is set to Black interests knows what I'm talking about.
  • So, Blackbird is to Firefox what RushmoreDrive is to Ask? Your "cute in theory" assessment feels right to me.

    http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/08/16/thinking-...
  • Check out the link to my blog about this browser.

    http://blog-aroundharlem.com/2008/12/08/blackbi...
  • Thanks for all the link love people. You guys rock!
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