OStatic

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.

I love the tabbed browsing feature in Firefox so much that it's not uncommon for me to have upwards of 20 open at a time. Unfortunately, several of them are often blank pages because I've forgotten where I was planning to go once I open them.

I've always wished that Firefox would intuitively know that if I highlight an address on a Web page and open a new tab, it's probably because I want to map it. Apparently, I'm not the only one longing for that feature. Mozilla is developing an extension that takes its best guesses about why you've opened a new tab in your Firefox browser.