How To Improve Your Social Life With Chrome

Whether you’re a lazy daisy or a social icon when it comes to organizing your social schedule, you probably rely on apps to help you keep things flowing. Whilst in this app era, browser extensions have been elbowed aside, but if you spend the majority of your time online and your browser is Chrome, extensions are available which can make Chrome the low-maintenance way to maintain a high social profile …

Talking to Tumblr just got easier:
Working like WordPress’ “Press It” and Pinterest’s “Pin It”, you can now Tumblr it with ease with Chrome’s Post to Tumblr extension. Additionally, with extended right-click functionality, the edge this extension has is that you can also use it to access your Tumblr blogs and send content to your drafts.

Reddit Enhancement Suite:
Reddit’s a popular but plain site, so this enhancement extension for Chrome allows a level of personalization and customization, of backgrounds, for example, as well as extended information about users.

Images = Instagram:
Without the hassle of opening a new window, Instagram for Chrome keeps your image stream flowing and allows all of the common interactions such as comments, likes etc … the only thing you’ll need that phone for is taking those pictures!

LastPass:
This extension for Chrome takes the headache out of that “think of a unique password” problem (we know, it’s bad medicine for our own good, we really shouldn’t keep using that same password over and over)! LastPass will auto-generate a strong password and save it ready for future use.

Bitly Shortener:
Originally a link shortener site, an inventive third party developer is now offering a Bitly analytics extension in Chrome, to help identify which of your links are growing your following.

Evernote Web Clipper:
One of the most popular organizational tools just got even better, with the addition of that little elephant icon in your Chrome browser! This creates a virtual ‘pocket’ as a one-click way to save and organize content you add from the web, straight into your Evernote notebooks!

Pocket:
Great for the ‘read later’ online browser, the Pocket extension for Chrome allows users to send articles over to mobiles for reading later. It can also be used as a ‘virtual’ base for storing articles of interest: great for news gathering and commute catch-ups.

Hover Zoom:
Bringing thumbnails into focus, the Hover Zoom extension will enlarge a thumbnail when you scroll over it: great for Twitter users, Facebook regulars and Google image users alike.

GChat Pix:
Communicating by image via browser is now an easy drag’n’drop process thanks to the GChat Pix extension. The original size is preserved, so there’s no mad thumb-nailing to get it to ‘go’, either!

Buffer:
A gem for Tweeple and Facebookers, the Buffer extension queues tweets and FB posts, so that they can be spread out, as well as auto-shortening the links if you have come to Buffer via Bitly. As a Twitter user who hates mass ‘dumps’ of Tweets which take up the whole stream and make me very disinclined to read them, it’d be great if more people knew about and started to use Buffer tools!

TOSDR:
Talking about not reading things. Terms Of Service Didn’t Read (TOSDR) acknowledges the fact that most of us don’t read the T & Cs of most sites we sign up to. This Chrome extension adds a handy letter or question mark to the end of the web-address of the site you’re on, and can bring up the latest debates as to the “fairness” of the site. It’s under continued development, so TOSDR isn’t yet available on all social sites out there, but it’s getting there!