While the developing of Chrome and its Open Source implementation Chromium is still going on, Google opened its API for extension programmers some time ago. Since then, both using simple bookmarklets and true extensions, developers tried to port to the new browser some features we are used to in Firefox.
There are plenty of posts ( have a look at digg ) talking about new extensions, plugins, features etc. What I want to discuss here is the ‘Social’ part of these contributions.
Even if they are not complete applications, like the full twitter clients we can use on Mozilla’s fox, I found 6 add-ons which are very useful fore some Social websites integration.
6. Friendfeed
If you’re a FriendFeed addicted user you’re probably using Cleaner Friendfeed, a simple GreaseMonkey code which takes care of giving the reader a simple and clean interface.
As Chrome supports User scripts, it is possible to enable it even in Google’s Browser. The Daily Haggis realized a step by step guide to enable and install the script.
There’s also a bookmarklet available for FriendFeed, please see Bookmarklets Section to install.
5. Twitter
Twitter is booming, and having the possibility to share a link with a shortcut is terribly useful. Firefox has a lot of extensions that enable even keyboard shortcuts and I got familiar using them, so I looked for something to enable them in Chrome too. On howtotuts I found a great guide, showing how to obtain a CTRL+ALT+T combination associated to a small JS script through the installation of AutoHotKey extension (setup for windows only, source available) .
There’s a bookmarklet available even for twitter, described both in the linked guide and in the Bookmarklets Section of this post.
4. Delicious
In this guide I describe how to realize a double integration between your Chrome installation and your Delicious account. To create the two-way sync, you will need to install a bookmarklet for bookmarks sharing and to setup a custom search engine to search through your saved items. The guide is very easy to follow and requires no more then 3 minutes to install everything.
3. Last.fm
Even if I do not use last.fm a lot I think that this extension is really well made and allow the user to simple but useful interaction with the famous music website. It is possible to favorite or ban a song from your playlist and then control the playing. I mostly like this because opposite to Firefox add-on it is terribly light and do not require a full toolbar to work fine. There’s not a guide in this case as this just requires to be installed as extension.
[ link to official download & forum thread ]
2. Google Reader
This is another one-click install extension, able to integrate with your Google Reader account and to help you saving feeds directly. It shows up as a feed icon in the right part of your omnibar ( address bar ) when the website you’re visiting has a feed. By clicking the icon the feed will be automatically added to your google account or, if the website got more then one feed, you will be prompted to choose which one you want to subscribe to.
[ link to official download & project page ]
Even in this case it is possible to perform a similar action using a bookmarklet. Go to the next chapter if you prefer this approach.
1. Bookmarklets
As extensions were not available on Chrome at the beginning, a lot of developers created Javascript codes to be run from a bookmark to perform actions on the webpage the user is visiting. Bookmarklets are very easy to install (drag & drop) and do not require any particular browser integration ( obviously they need to be compatible with its JS interpreter ) so they proliferated a lot, mainly as one-click sharing buttons.
I found this nice list of many useful bookmarklets, containing a lot of social websites like tumblr, digg, friendfeed, socialize, stumble upon and so on. Choose your favorite and use it in seconds!
[ link to the bookmarklet list ]
Conclusions
Ok, we can not still compare Firefox extensions to what is available for Chrome. Most add-ons are really non-professional works and it will probably take a long time before we will be able to see something officially released from Social Media giants .
Anyway as in my opinion the browsing experience is really, really better using Google Chrome the add-ons, tricks and tips I presented in this post are a good compromise while we’re waiting for officials or just better realized extensions.
