Blackbird Opens Walled Garden and Releases Mac Version

Blackbird, the web browser catering to African Americans, released a Mac Version. If you’ve been wondering what black-oriented content you’ve been missing because you have a Mac and couldn’t previously run Blackbird, your prayers have been answered. We talked about Blackbird when it originally launched, then again 5 months later.

The Mac version has all the same features you’d expect to find from the PC version. The scrolling news ticker, the customized black search, and links to Blackbird’s custom channels. You can also attach your email and social networking accounts. It has the same white-on-black color-scheme, which I wasn’t expecting. I figured moving it to the Mac would make it prettier, but we’re still talking about what amounts to a clone of Firefox.

In playing with Blackbird again, I did notice that a few things had changed. In my last post, I talked about Blackbird’s channels being locked into the browser for no apparent reason. So, you could only access the jobs directory, local business directory, videos etc. if you actually downloaded and installed the browser. I felt this was an unnecessary step and limited the visibility of these tools. It seems either the Blackbird guys agreed or they have made some type of error, because you can now access a few of their channels via any web browser.

• Blackbird Local – find black business near you
• Do Good – Powered by Good2Gether, this area lets you find causes to support/donate to
• Marketplace – Here, you can buy african american DVD’s and books. This area is powered by Code Black and is actually exactly the same as the Code Black store, but with Blackbird branding.

There are two major areas that are still on lock down. Blackbird’s video channel and it’s Grapevine Digg clone. I can understand why the video channel might be accessible only via the browser. It might take a little work to create a web interface for the collection of videos available, but I’m still not understanding how Blackbird or the black community in general benefits from having a site full of black content locked into a niche browser.

Besides the general technical and user interface issues, there is one other thing about Blackbird that I don’t understand. Why is a black web browser so disconnected from the community it’s supposed to be for? The Mac version was released last week, but the website makes no mention of the new version (site news feed last updated 3/19). I figured there would be something on the blog, but there hasn’t been a post there since May 1st. I checked their twitter account, thinking maybe they’re keeping things simple, but they haven’t touched that since Sept 15th.

Maybe there is a micro-niche of black people they’re going for that don’t read blogs, aren’t on Twitter. Maybe there is a secret mailing list that I wasn’t aware of where they share updates and news on Blackbird. Maybe simply being black doesn’t necessarily mean that Blackbird is for me. Whatever the case may be, I’m just not feeling the community love from Blackbird. The lack of public interactions or updates makes it seem dead in the water.