Blackbird browser reaches out to African American community

By David Chartier | Published: December 09, 2008 - 05:14AM CT

The Internet may have created a largely color-blind world wide web that connects users with just about any information they could ever want. But Ed Young, CEO of 40A, Inc. believes that his company can make the Internet better for the African-American community with Blackbird, a new Mozilla-based browser. We took a look at Blackbird and spoke with Young about the motivation behind introducing a tailored browser.

Fundamentally, Blackbird is a customized version of Firefox 3 for Windows XP and Vista. It includes a dark black theme, a variety of tweaked tools that search African American resources, news, and video sites, social bookmarking and networking tools, webmail integration, and a charity content channel called "Do Good" that connects users with African American-focused organizations. This channel features news and directories of African American services and charities that make it easy for users to get informed and get active.

Blackbird's default UI at startup, complete with news
ticker and extra toolbar for custom features

Besides the theme, though, the only two noticeable changes from a default Firefox 3 install are just a ticker at the top that streams information from African-American news resources, and a toolbar below Firefox's bookmarks bar with buttons for most of the aforementioned features. The idea behind Blackbird, Young told Ars, is "to broaden the Internet experience for African Americans. We want to offer a tool that makes it easier for this community to find resources that are geared more towards them."

After soft launching (with no official marketing) as a beta Sunday night, Blackbird has already received a tremendous amount of interest—and mixed reactions. Young said that some early feedback has viewed Blackbird as almost a racist or exclusionary product. As an African American himself, though, Young explained that "it isn't about exclusion, but rather inclusion."

For the most part, Blackbird works like Firefox 3 and most other browsers, and Young says that everyone is invited to use it. But when using Blackbird's built-in search box, results will skew towards African-American news sources and blogs, again, in an effort to highlight those resources for the community. A search for "Barack Obama" in Safari's search box, for example, will bring results like BarackObama.com, Wikipedia, and Chicago Tribune. But the same query in Blackbird's box will return results from AOL Black Voices and blogs.bet.com.

Blackbird's "Do Good" channel, video sidebar, and webmail integration enabled

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."

When asked why his company didn't simply produce a couple of add-ons for Firefox instead of an entire customized version, Young's answers confirmed the obvious. "Add-ons aren't nearly as exciting or powerful for what we want to do. It would be a lot more difficult to tell the story, and it's easier to get people to download one browser than a bunch of add-ons that they would have to customize and keep updated." Young also feels that, with Firefox at 21 percent of the browser market and African Americans making up 14 percent of the US population, a branded browser has a better chance of achieving visibility and playing the numbers game to reach its audience.

Since Blackbird is still so new, though, Young hasn't even had a chance to check in on statistics like download numbers yet. His company has already been flooded with interest and requests from organizations, though, such as The On It Foundation.org which helps corporations to donate their computers to low-income families.

It isn't clear yet whether Blackbird will catch on with its target audience, but the idea of a tailored, standards-based browser is definitely an interesting one. Thanks to the flexibility of Firefox and its license, Young and his company are able to give the idea a shot. Young wouldn't say much about what else his company has in store for Blackbird during its beta period, but he did confirm that a Mac version and "lots of interesting stuff" are on their way.