Kori Covrigaru is a young entrepreneur, currently CEO of PlanOmatic, an online real estate marketing company providing interactive home tours. Kori grew up in Michigan, went to school and Western Michigan University, and currently lives in Colorado, enjoying the mountains in all seasons.

If you can relate to one of the situations listed below, then “RockMelt – Your Browser. Re-Imagined.” is definitely for you. On the other hand, perhaps what I meant to say is exactly the opposite. If you can relate to any of these situations, download Google Chrome J… I guess that’s for you to decide.

• You consider yourself to be a “Social Media Guru”.
• You spend most of your time on the web surfing through facebook, updating your status and posting new tweets.
• Every other click on your computer takes you from one social networking site to another.
• You’ve closed your browser window, only to find yourself opening a new one and subconsciously going directly back to the same social media site you just left (yes, it happens to the best of us).
• You’ve just finished a two-hour couch session with your laptop, and find yourself browsing through facebook and twitter in bed with your smartphone, only to read the same exact posts you read five minutes ago.

RockMelt, available for both Windows and Mac, is a remarkable social networking, news feed and content contributing platform built directly into a desktop web browser. It incorporates facebook, twitter, RSS feeds, sharing solutions and much more while maintaining a clean, easy to navigate user interface. See a snapshot below.

I have RockMelt installed on my Mac, but is RockMelt for me? Probably not.  Without the help of RockMelt, I find myself plenty distracted by news and social networking sites throughout the day as it is. Perhaps if social media is your business, I can see how RockMelt might be right for you.  However, for those of us who don’t use social media to earn a living, I think we’ll pass.  Isn’t social networking easy enough to come across in a standard web browser?  Do we really need facebook, twitter and RSS feeds hovering on the outskirts of our window as we type in a simple search for directions to the closest convenience store?  I think I’ll stick to my bookmarks for now.

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So Redfin was on 60 Minutes last night – What’s your take?

Mine? Hardly hard-hitting journalism. A PR puff piece if I ever saw one. Redfin just got handed a trophy before the race is even finished.

That said, I’m a big Redfin fan and I think the 60 Minutes story is just what they needed to kick off their next round of investment – here’s hoping they find it, the industry won’t be half as fun without them.

For me, the Redfin brouhaha overshadowed a much more interesting announcement though. The news that Facebook is going to offer free Classifieds. Now you can sell your junk on to your network of buddies. (More from Drew Meyers – who even tests it out).

The big brokers shouldn’t worry about Redfin – what they should be worried about is Facebook.

No, I don’t literally mean the site best known as a way for college kids to organize the next kegger and ‘Friend’ each other – I do mean social networks and their growing popularity and use in many aspects of business however.

The MLS was the original social network. It designed to allow brokers to share listings with each other. What social networking software like Facebook or Ning accomplish is takes that power to disseminate information and hand it directly to the individuals, to the agents themselves.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a fully functional social network designed exclusively for agents to share listings with each other by year’s end.

With infrastructure like that coupled with the ability to create their own networks, an agent’s dependence on having access to the MLS through their broker becomes less and less relevant.

Agents could develop their own networks to be as exclusive or inclusive as they want. They could be hyper local or broadly based. One can imagine many scenarios where these networks could be very effective ways to market properties, especially on the high end; for Beverly Hills luxury homes or New York Brownstoners, homes in the Hamptons or land in Montana, for example.

So who’s in the position to develop this kind of site? Well, certainly Zillow – I have an inkling that their Agent Profiles are just the first step in this direction… they already claim to have 30,000 agents active on their site already, and all they have to do is give them the means to connect with each other. ActiveRain already does this, so does the Point2NLS but both sites are kind of clumsy in their implementation of truly social features. Move.com would be wise to ‘move’ in this direction but would probably struggle with agent buy-in, at least initially.

A stumbling block may be the lack of desire for agents to work together, but I think the spirit of “coopertition” can thrive here. Marketing properties to consumers is just the first step (see Marketing Real Estate on Facebook), marketing listings to each other could be the next.

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