Mozilla thinks so. Today the folks who brought us FireFox rolled out BlackBird, a web browser targeted toward African Americans. Developed by black-owned software company 40A Inc, Blackbird describes itself as “a software application designed for the African American community by the African American community” and it claims to help black people find websites, news and charitable causes io interest to the black community. Of course, news of a black browser caused commenters at mainstream tech blogs to lose their damned minds.

 

 

After debating thinking about this at work today I still can’t decide if a black-focused web browser is necessary or not. With all of the social networks, blogs (like us!) and black-focused webs sites out there, a black web browser seems like an advertising tool more than anything. And personally, I don’t want McDonalds to be able to target me with their Negro-specific, blaxpolitation ads more than they already do. It already looks like BlackBird is poised to do just that:

 

When users go to the Most Shared tab there is a bottom ‘sponsored by’ window that already runs small banners for Essence among others. There is also marketing value in the preloaded websites and RSS feeds which could be a boon to black online publishers and aggregators. [Source]

 

On the other hand, a targetted browser could help up-and-coming black websites (like us!) connect directly to their audience instead of leaving it all up to word of mouth or chance. What say ye? Would you ditch your regular browser for one focused on your ethnicity, or is it smarter for Mozilla to build browsers around interests (ie. a fashion-focused broswer, a poltically-focused one, etc)?

 

 

And, perhaps most importantly, when did it become OK for EVERY black product to ride Obama’s “Yes We Can” coat tails? lol

 

Tags: Ads, Barack Obama, Black People, BlackBird, blogs, McDonalds, Mozilla, TechCrunch, Web Browsing