No sooner has Google announced its Facebook-killing Google+ social platform and we’re already seeing developers at work creating tools to make the online sharing experience just that little bit easier.
Surplus is an extension for Google Chrome, allowing users to easily access their Google+ notifications and compose new posts from anywhere on the Web. So, this extension lets you read, comment and share without having to be on the Google domain.
You can post or respond from within a little pop-up, receiving notifications on your desktop, including sounds and you can even switch between several Google accounts.
This is a really neat extension that makes sharing in Google+ much easier.
Google+ doesn’t have an inbuilt way to transfer your Facebook friends over to the new social app, but since Facebook is clearly dead and everyone is on Google+ nowadays it’s best to get your contacts moved over before Facebook’s servers are switched off for good.
That might be far from the truth — though in the five minutes that were between myself getting invited through the backdoor and Google opening invites up to all existing users, the place went from ghost town to 90s rave — but it’d still be handy to have the option.
Mohamed Mansour on Google+ shares the easiest existing method of bringing users over from one service to the other, with the Facebook Friend Exporter extension for Chrome.
The tool adds an “Export friends” button to the Facebook toolbar. Please be aware that actually exporting your friends could lead to jail time for human trafficking.
Depending on how many friends you have, it could take a while, but the app keeps you up-to-date on the process.
What this process does is add your Facebook friends to Google Contacts. It does not actually add them to any of your Google+ circles. However, this is far and away the easiest way to go about inviting and adding friends on Google+, as it uses your Google Contacts to suggest people to invite using an easy drag and drop process. Any other method that’s available at the time of this writing is much more tedious.
Chrome’s user base “more than doubled” in the past year with browser uptake increasing from 70 million to 160 million thanks to Linux, Windows, and OS X versions of the browser finally reaching parity. Google is touting speed and security as their major priorities with each Chrome release.
Google plans major improvements over the next few months including speech support built into the browser as well as more developer APIs to improve user interaction. Speech systems, for example, will allow you to use Chrome to translate speech in real time.
They’ve also improved HTLM5 rendering (they were able to get about a thousand fish floating in this test at Microsoft). It also features improved WebGL support.
