Tuesday, July 26, 2011

G+me Chrome Extension Enhances the Google+ Experience

If you're an avid Google+ user with a lot of followers, chances are a new extension called G+me could help you control the flood of incoming posts and significantly improve your experience on the service.

The extension has many features that arguably make Google+ better. For one, its toolbar icon shows G+ notifications in real-time.

This means that users don't need to be on Google-related tabs to see if there's anything new happening on G+. The notifications are now visible everywhere.

However, the central feature of this extension is that its ability to collapse read posts while remembering their last state for future sessions.

Additionally, if users want to keep the posts expanded but not see all the associated comments, G+me gives them the option to hide the comment stream.

The collapsed comments bar will continue to show and update the comment number at the end and if a new one is posted, hovering the mouse pointer over the comment number will display a pop-up with the content.

Similarly, hovering the mouse pointer over a collapsed post will display a fully-functional preview of its extended version. Users can also opt for list-mode view which keeps all posts collapsed by default and allows a single one to be extended at a time.

The comments left by users on both the Chrome Web Store and the developer's blog are largely favorable and people seem to be very happy with the extension.

"I have no technical comment. However, this has made Google+ far more usable to me. Kudos, if I may use a term that should be deprecated," said one user. It's creator, a coder named Huy Zing, is also considering writing a version for Firefox.

A week old, the extension has already been deployed by over 6,000 users from the Chrome Web Store where it has a five-star rating from 100 votes.