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Yoono boosts your Firefox’s social skills

May 14th, 2008

Users who spend a fair share of their web time around social web sites and chat will be glad to meet the new Yoono 5, currently in private beta status.

Yoono 5 beta is a powerful Firefox extension, that integrates with several social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, Piczo, Flickr and FriendFeed. Once you provide your credentials, you are able to see contacts in each network, their latest activities, posted photos and access to their respective messaging systems, post to Twitter or upload photos to Flickr.

It also supports several instant messaging networks including Gadu-Gadu, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!, GTalk and AIM. You can chat with buddies in any of these networks in different tabs, all within the same Yoono sidebar.

As previous versions, Yoono also inobtrusively provides YouTube videos, Flickr photos and web page recommendations related to the page you are currently viewing. It also identifies keywords and provides links at the top you can click to search Yoono for more related content.

A music widget provides a player in the same sidebar that serves music from either last.fm or the Shoutcast directory, which amount for a very wide variety of Internet radio.

Yet another widget, Web Notes, lets you save small web notes, links and images, mark them as good, bad or funny, rate them, organize them in folders, edit them with a simple rich text editor, blog them to one of the support blogging platforms (custom WordPress installation, Blogger, Live Journal, MySpace, Live Spaces, and Meta Weblog) and share them with your friends or the world.

The ability to undock the Web Notes (and any other) widget proved to be most helpful for blogging.

I must confess I have always been very skeptic about this kind of integrators but in the few days I’ve been using it, it has proved to be a real aid while adding more fun to web zapping.

The latest beta is compatible with Firefox 3 beta 5 as well as nightlies.