As mentioned earlier today, we attended SF Music Hack Day this past weekend and saw some amazing demos. One of the more popular hacks came from a Chrome extension called Turntable.fm Extended which adds concert listings along the left-hand side of the screen for each artist currently playing in a Turntable.fm room.

The hack itself, along with the rest of the Chrome extension, is absolutely brilliant and makes the Turntable.fm experience into a more useful one, rather than purely for your listening and chatting enjoyment.

The hack comes from developer Mark Reeder and uses SongKick’s API to find concert listings for the artist sorted by distance from your current location.

From entertainment to utility

Tunrtable.fm Extended also provides some other helpful tweaks such as a desktop notifier for the Turntable.fm chatroom that you’re in. You can even tweak the notifier to only pop up when certain words are said. That filtering capability ensures you don’t get swamped with notifications.

With the extension, you’ll find the concert listings on the left and a list of tags on the right. The extension lets you assign tags to all of the music you have in your Turntable.fm queue for easy sorting and finding later:

While the site gets a bit busy on its own with all that’s going on, the additional information is definitely utility-based and doesn’t require any constant attention like the rest of Turntable.fm does. My absolute favorite feature of the extension is the music suggester which will give you suggestions of new songs based on what’s playing in real-time within the room:

This is perfect for when you’re trying to keep a specific vibe in the room going, because there is nothing worse than a DJ playing Guns ‘N Roses in a Reggae room. This feature is also a cool way to discover new tunes for yourself to check out later on Spotify or your music streaming service of choice.

While the extension does seem to slow down the page a bit because of all of the data it’s bringing in every time a song changes, it’s something you can switch on and off when you really want to learn more about the artists playing in the room.

➤ Turntable.fm Extended for Chrome

RockMelt started developing its social browser in 2009, and went into private beta in November 2010. At the time, the word of mouth buzz made it something worth checking out, but didn’t really stick. It had nothing to do with the product though, it turns out that RockMelt was about three years ahead of its time.

The company has $39M in funding from top tier venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, and Accel Partners, so clearly they’re on to something. But what, exactly? How can a browser company that is built on the same codebase as Google’s Chrome warrant so much funding? It turns out that a keen focus on social is the answer to that question.

I spoke to RockMelt’s co-founder and CEO Eric Vishria yesterday about what he sees as the biggest year of opportunity for browsers since their inception.

2011 was a year to remember

As we reported in November, Internet Explorer fell under 50% in browser market share for the first time ever. Along with Google “buying its way to #2″ as Vishria puts it, and Firefox seeing a slight decline for the first time since its launch, the browser market will be more competitive than ever in 2012.

With everything on the web becoming more social, it makes sense that browsers would take that leap too. Or at least browsers with social features, as RockMelt hopes. Vishria also called 2011 the end of the battle between two giants:

In a few years, we’ll look back and say that it was the end of the war between Google and Microsoft. We’ll also say that it was the beginning of the war between Facebook and Google.

While that led me to ask Vishria if he thought RockMelt’s partner, Facebook, would create its own browser, he said “It seems pretty clear that Facebook is dedicated to partnerships”. That sounds like a no, and since Facebook has over 800 million users, they’ll visit the site no matter what browser they’re using.

Identity and Communication

When referring to browsers of yesteryear, RockMelt’s CEO called them “big dumb windows”, meaning you’d type in a web address, go somewhere and interact. It wasn’t until Firefox that a search box first appeared in the toolbar of a browser, and that alone has caused more search activity than ever, which is why Google renewed its contract with the number two browser.

Rockmelt says that 80% of searches done using its browser are through its toolbar, and the company is banking on its mostly under 35 audience wanting to take more actions from what it calls the “OmniBox” as well.

For example, when using RockMelt, you can you connect with Facebook and that will allow you to take a few social actions based on searches that are autocompleted for you. In this example, when searching for “Brett”, I’m able to go directly to his Facebook profile, chat with him through the browser, or write something on his wall:

These might be things you can do in Chrome or Firefox with an extension or add-on, but RockMelt thinks that younger users who just want to be social aren’t interested in searching something like the Chrome store for what could be a strong native feature. Speaking to the social nature of RockMelt users, Vishria shared that an average RockMelt user performs seven chats a day. Instead of downloading another app or going to Facebook’s site, its users can chat right through the browser.

Social isn’t the only focus for RockMelt, it wants to build a great experience for mobile, and will tackle tablets first. It currently has an iOS app that syncs all of your bookmarks and accounts onto your iPhone, but I’m told that the company wants to push the envelope in mobile browsing, which as Vishria puts it, “sucks right now”.

Market share be gone

While overall market share for browsers does tell us who the big players are, a smaller piece of the pie, say just 5%, could equal millions of users for a company like RockMelt. Any company who can get its community to install its software on more than one device on average definitely has a shot to come in and steal a small piece of the overall pie. Having been in public beta since April 2011, the best is yet to come for RockMelt.

The browser also lets you share the things you read without having to click a button, and those items will fly past your friends eyes on the Facebook ticker, thanks to RockMelt’s partnership with the social network. It’s features like this and an engaged community that could help RockMelt become a success, without the need or intent of using millions of dollars for marketing like some have. When you have a social product that people like, word of mouth goes a long way.

With three years under its belt in the browser game, RockMelt isn’t going anywhere. And even though many might narrowly focus on market share, the company is focused on making its users happier and more social.

➤ RockMelt

When you surf the web, you have to click a thumbnail image to make it larger. But it’s not usually just one click, though. When you’re on a site like Amazon, if you see something you’re interested in on the homepage, you have to click the item and then click the image you’d like to enlarge. That’s two clicks just because you want to see what a product looks like.

These types of situations are exactly why extensions and add-ons for browsers are so awesome. The Hover Zoom extension for Chrome is no exception, and will take a few clicks out of your browsing by enlarging photos when you hover over them with your mouse.

If you were to count all of the clicks you make throughout a day spent on the web, you’d probably find that you’re wasting more time than you’d think.

Clicking is so 2011

If you’re looking to streamline your web browsing, Hover Zoom is definitely for you. After you install the extension, you’ll be alerted in the URL input box when the extension is active. The Hover Zoom creator says that the extension works with most major sites like Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, 4Chan, Flickr, and Reddit. Pretty much any site that links thumbnails to its larger version will work successfully with the extension.

As long as the above image appears when you land on a site, start hovering over any photo you see and the larger version will show up with no clicks required. You can change how long of a delay there is before the larger image displays in a lightbox, in case you’re worried about accidental hovers.

The settings for Hover Zoom can also control what sites the extension is active on, letting you create a list of sites to leave out or include. Other settings include loading images in the background as soon as you visit a page, but that will slow your browsing down quite a bit, even though the images will load faster afterwards.

These are the type of lifehacks that make browsing the web easier and less annoying. Even browsing around on a Facebook Timeline and seeing a larger image without having to click is super helpful.

What are your favorite Chrome extensions? Share them in the comments.

➤ Hover Zoom for Chrome

Imagine logging into any service on the web and being told that it’s probably a good idea to stop using a browser extension that you’ve installed. That’s what happened to one of our faithful readers, Derek.

The Missing e Chrome extension, which has a name that pokes fun at Tumblr’s lack of a second vowel, adds a ton of functionality to your experience on the social blogging platform. It’s quite popular too, with the Chrome Web Store reporting 258,408 users.

When Derek logged into Tumblr today, he was greeted with this overwhelming pop-up:

In the prompt, the company says that it loves developers who create add-on experiences for its site, but it creates issues that are a “burden” on its support staff. In particular, Tumblr says that Missing e may cause data loss, privacy, and performance issues that it can’t support. It sounds like one of those TV commercials for medications where they rattle off all of the side-effects they may cause.

Third-party extensions and hacks are a part of the web, perhaps Tumblr should focus on building new features or its own official “app store” instead of whining about support and server issues.

One of my major problems while using the web is having too many browser tabs open. At the end of the day I’ll have 10 tabs open on Google Chrome and an additional 5-10 on Firefox. Not only does this slow my machine down, it’s annoying to keep track of.

Why do I keep so many tabs open? Usually, it’s because I want to go back to them later, but don’t necessarily want to clog up my bookmarks with random links. It’s a silly system, but since I work at a lot of coffee shops and see a lot of other Internet surfers, it looks like I’m not the only one.

So what if you could snooze a web page like you can with an alarm? Now you can thanks to the Page Snooze Chrome extension. It’s a genius idea and works like a charm.

Go away, tabs

Once you install the Page Snooze extension for Chrome, you can simply CTRL click on any page, and you’ll be shown options on how long you’d like to snooze a page. You can choose anything up to 2 weeks, and as soon as you snooze the page, the tab promptly disappears.

When the snooze period is complete, the tab will automagically re-appear. This is perfect if there’s a page you’re tracking for a short period of time and it doesn’t necessitate a bookmark. Perhaps it’s a product page or a piece of news that you want a quick update on, snoozing the tab is the way to go.

By clicking on the extension’s options, you can see your currently snoozed tabs and click-through to the pages if you’d like.

I’ll be using this extension quite a bit, and staggering out the snoozed pages will keep me from piling up tabs like I tend to do.

➤ Page Snooze

Opera Mini is easily one of the most popular mobile browsers, with 144M unique users monthly worldwide. The company pulled the stats on the top 10 visited mobile sites in 2011, with the data collected spanning November 2010-2011.

According to Opera‘s stats, Google still takes the cake when it comes to search, but Facebook is a close number two. It’s interesting to note that Facebook is more popular than YouTube, a popular destination on mobile devices. It seems like people have to get their poking fix on the road.

The world’s most popular websites on Opera Mini 2011 are:

1. google.com
2. facebook.com
3. youtube.com (up 1)
4. vkontakte.ru (down 1)
5. odnoklassniki.ru
6. yandex.ru
7. wikipedia.org (up 4)
8. my.opera.com
9. yahoo.com (down 2)
10. twitter.com (up 2)

In addition to the top 10 sites, Opera picked up on a few interesting mobile browsing trends for 2011:

• Wikipedia, Blogger and Spaces all saw significant gains in 2011, whereas Wapdam, Orkut, Detik and Live all dropped out of the global top 20 as the year progressed.
• Six handsets made the top 20 list in November 2011 that were not present on the list in November 2010. Five of them were Nokia handsets and one was a Samsung handset.
• Between November 2010 and November 2011, Latin America showed the fastest growth in terms of Opera Mini users (up 247%), followed by Africa (up 145%) and South Asia (up 138%). This is the second year in a row that Latin America showed the fastest growth.

The growth in Latin America reflects exactly what we reported yesterday, with mobile activations in Brazil alone having 19.51% lift year-on-year.

While this is only data from Opera and its mobile browser, it is a good sign that mobile browsing is becoming more sophisticated and in-depth, shown by the growth of sites like Wikipedia. It seems like people aren’t just checking email on their mobile devices anymore.

While Mozilla was promising to release version 9 of its Firefox browser tomorrow, the official download links are live now.

Huge performance changes have been made in this release, while there aren’t any user interface changes that you’ll notice.

The double-digit increases in performance that most are reporting come from a new feature called “type inference”, created by Mozilla developer Brian Hackett. The feature now quickly chooses how to handle JavaScript, which doesn’t require a developer to define a variable. That makes the browser work overtime, but with type inference, the difference in performance is definitely noticeable.

Here are the rest of the changes and updates that come with version 9 of Firefox:

Added Type Inference, significantly improving JavaScript performance
Improved theme integration for Mac OS X Lion
Added two finger swipe navigation for Mac OS X Lion
Added support for querying Do Not Track status via JavaScript
Added support for font-stretch
Improved support for text-overflow
Improved standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS
Fixed several stability issues

You can download Firefox 9 for Mac, Windows, and Linux now.

Up until today, Tweetdeck only had a web version available for users that chose Chrome as their browser of choice. Now a part of Twitter, Tweetdeck has something that nicely coincides with Twitter’s new plans for simplification.

Today, Tweetdeck has launched its web version for everyone. If you’re not excited about Twitter’s upcoming new interface, this might be your shot to stick with a browser interface that you’re used to.

Simply visit http://web.tweetdeck.com and sign in, and you’ll see all of your tweets in full Tweetdeck glory. You’ll notice notice that Tweetdeck’s logo is now a lovely shade of Twitter blue.

Firefox and Google Chrome continue to rise, with 21.20% and 16.59% of the browser market share respectively. Even though Apple continues to sell more and more mobile devices with its Safari browser, the company only holds 8.54% of total browser usage.

The difference in browser share could be due to applications being available on the Firefox and Chrome platforms, whereas Internet Explorer seems stale at this point.

With more Google devices shipping with Chrome and Chrome OS, you can expect the market share for Chrome to rise dramatically in 2012. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer will more than likely continue to plummet.

Internet Explorer may be struggling but Microsoft’s Hotmail is growing… thanks to the iPhone.

We told you about the simple and beautifully designed polling platform GoPollGo this month, and the company has announced some enhancements to its free service.

If you need to get public opinion from people on popular social networking platforms, GoPollGo is the best service I’ve found to do that. The service gave you basic location analytics from those who have interacted, but more robust polling data is now available.

Go Go Analytics

GoPollGo now lets you segment votes by location, age, gender, operating system, referring website, and browser type, all in real-time.

This is a pretty advanced offering for a free service, and anyone can benefit from these added items. You don’t have to be a big company to get a decent set of data from a poll.

Below, you’ll find a full screenshot of the new data:

I spoke with GoPollGo founder and CEO Ben Schaechter about today’s launch:

TNW: Since launching, what type of numbers are you seeing in regards to how many polls are submitted and voted on?

Ben Schaechter: Each short-lived poll on average collects roughly 60 votes. To give you an idea, since the relaunch of our site three months ago with real-time analytics, we’ve had hundreds of thousands of votes come in.

TNW: How did you choose which analytic items would get added to the site?

Ben Schaechter: Age, Gender and Location are interesting and relevant to everyone: Especially large brands, media agencies and politicians (Imagine how valuable this data is to any politician right now). Operating System, Browser and referring domain were all suggestions from our users. For example, there is sometimes noticeable difference between thought of votes coming from Facebook as compared to Twitter, etc.

TNW: What is the most popular question ever asked on GoPollGo?

Ben Schaechter: The most popular poll ever created on GoPollGo was this one here: http://gopollgo.com/if-you-could-work-for-a-startup-any-startup-which-one-would-it-be. The reason is because Jack Dorsey, Brian Chesky, Dennis Crowley, Kevin Rose and a slew of other tweeted/posted the poll as a competition.

The data that GoPollGo collects can make or break a marketing campaign, or help you to decide which new smart phone to buy. With more data, it’s easier to take these responses seriously. I’d like to see the company work on embedding these polls in new places, rather than focusing on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. As we know with polls, you can’t take it serious until you have a decent amount of responses. Focusing on helping companies get hundreds of responses submitted on their polls will make GoPollGo a near-perfect service.