Five Microblogging Extensions For Firefox
by Lisa Hoover - Jul. 27, 2009Comments (5)- Related Blog Posts
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Unless you've been living in a cave for the past year, you know that microblogging is all the rage. Web sites like Twitter, Identi.ca, and Laconica are incredibly popular for exchanging snippets of information, chatting with others, and quickly sharing links to interesting online content. It's really a pain to jump from site to site to read your friends updates or provide your own, so here are five microblogging extensions for Firefox to help you out.
ShortenURL - Microbloggers don't want to waste precious characters on long URLs so it's customary to shorten links you display in status updates. Pasting a Web site location into URL shortening service homepage is so last week now that you can do it right from your browser's toolbar. ShortenURL makes quick work of this repetitive task by letting you crop Web addresses right from the toolbar. It supports over 100 URL shortening services already but if that's not enough, you can request more.
PingFire - If you're like most microbloggers, you use more than one service every day, but if you're tied up updating Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, and Identi.ca all day when do you get any work done? Ping.fm is a great option for blasting updates to more than one microblogging Web site at a time but it still requires you to visit yet another URL and click around a bunch of times to do what you need. Use PingFire to post to Ping.fm directly from Firefox which, in turn, updates all the sites you've linked to it. If you just want to share info from a Web site you're visiting, simply highlight some text on the page, click the Ping toolbar button, and let the extension do the rest.
Shareaholic - There's more to mircroblogging than just telling people what movie you went to last night. One of its more valuable uses for social bookmarking, or sharing links to interesting content you find online. Shareaholic makes it easy to share URLs with others via Digg, Delicious, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Gmail. This neat little add-on even tracks page popularity on Digg and Delicious so you can keep track of how well Web sites and blog posts are trending.
Social Media for Firefox - If most of your microblogging centers around link sharing, then this is one extension you must have. Social Media for Firefox scans social bookmarking Web sites Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious and lets you know how many votes the Web page your on has received across those sites. If the blog post or news article you're browsing hasn't been shared yet, this add-on lets you know so you can be the first to submit it. Getting recognized as a top social bookmarker is a numbers game: the more unique and popular links you share, the higher you rank.
What are some of your top microblogging tools add-ons for Firefox? Let me know in the comments.
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