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

Today, Google has finally released its Chrome browser for Android in a beta version.

It’s been four years since Google Chrome launched for the desktop and the mobile version will finally allow you to sync all of your information for a true seamless mobile experience. Unfortunately, it’s not available to everyone, as this version will only run on phones that have Ice Cream Sandwich.

This is what the team had to say about the release:

In 2008, we launched Google Chrome to help make the web better. We’re excited that millions of people around the world use Chrome as their primary browser and we want to keep improving that experience. Today, we’re introducing Chrome for Android Beta, which brings many of the things you’ve come to love about Chrome to your Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone or tablet. Like the desktop version, Chrome for Android Beta is focused on speed and simplicity, but it also features seamless sign-in and sync so you can take your personalized web browsing experience with you wherever you go, across devices.

Here’s a video demo of the beta version of Chrome for Android:

Along with being able to sync all of your bookmarks and browsing information, the Android team says they have “re-imagined” tabs specifically for the mobile device. The app will run beautifully on both phones and tablets, with swipe gestures allowing you to go through the tabs that you have open.

The company made no mention of Chrome becoming available for devices running older versions of its operating system, but I imagine that once the beta period has run a decent course, it should support all Android devices.

➤ Chrome for Android (Beta)

If you’re an avid user of Google+, you know that one of the things that makes your experience crappy is the spam you get. You know what I’m talking about. You post an animated GIF of a dog walking on a rainbow and all of a sudden you get a comment from someone you don’t know with a link to a site that’s probably up to no good.

It’s a similar problem on blogs, and Google does have a system for deleting comments and blocking users, but it’s kind of clunky. Sure, you could share with only your circles and that would keep the spammers from commenting, but that makes you feel trapped.

No need to feel trapped anymore, thanks to a new Google Chrome extension called “Nuke Comments on Google+“, which not only delete the offending comment, but automatically blocks the user in just one click.

Once you install the extension for Chrome, you’ll find a new button sitting next to comments that say “Nuke”. Don’t click it on accident though!

Once you’ve “nuked” a comment, you’ll be notified that it is complete. After that, you don’t have to think about that user again because they’re automatically blocked:

The only thing that this extension is missing is the “report” feature. While deleting a comment and blocking someone does the trick, it doesn’t tell Google who to look out for as far as spamming. However, clicking that nuke button sure does make you feel like you have control of your stream again.

➤ Nuke Comments on Google+“

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

Google has announced some changes to its popular Chrome app that allows you to access your Gmail account offline.

The biggest feature of the bunch is the ability to now choose how many days of email you’d like to synchronize for offline viewing. The options are 7, 14 or 31 days now. If you have a long flight or plan on spending some quiet time in the woods, this feature will definitely come in handy.

Additionally, the Google team has made some performance enhancements that doesn’t make using the offline app feel like such a chore anymore:

Improved attachments: All attachments are now downloaded and available for offline use
Keyboard shortcuts support: If you have keyboard shortcuts enabled in Gmail, your setting will transfer over to the Gmail offline app. If you’re not sure what you can do with keyboard shortcuts, try pressing ‘?’ next time you’re using Gmail or Gmail offline.
Numerous performance enhancements: Messages and attachments now download at a faster rate and some bugs have been fixed.

Pulling over your settings is great, but the new handling of attachments is absolutely clutch. Before this update, there were many times that you’d try to grab one of your attachments while offline and it simply wasn’t there because you forgot to download them beforehand.

As the offline product has evolved, it’s looking more and more like Microsoft’s Outlook than the original version of Gmail, but nobody seems to be complaining about that. I for one appreciate the team keeping an eye on speed rather than making its UI overly fancy.

➤ Offline Google Mail for Chrome

Unlike a lot of my colleagues at The Next Web, I primarily use the web version of Twitter. With its latest redesign, I find myself using it more even though I’m tweeting less. I also use DMs as a replacement for text messages for communication with my close friends and family.

Even though Twitter is all about transferring information in real-time, direct messages are still a laggy experience that need tightening up. It’s not a chat, text, or email, but it’s somewhere in between. One of the features that I feel is missing from the Twitter experience is actual real-time chat like you find on Google+ and Facebook.

An extension for Chrome and Firefox called Bonfire integrates a real-time chat experience into the web version of Twitter. It’s extremely well done and fits into the new design quite nicely. Unlike a service we covered last year, Blether, it requires no other tabs or actual tweets to start a conversation.

Don’t DM, just chat

Direct messages on Twitter are still time-shifted, meaning that the conversation taking place doesn’t require either of you to be connected to the Internet while using it. Basically, that means if you have an important question or just want to say hi, there’s no guarantee that you’ll hear back from the person in any set amount of time.

The only way you truly know if someone is “active” on Twitter is based on the last time they tweeted, and that still doesn’t guarantee that you can speak with them immediately unless you want to bug them with a phone call or text message.

That’s why I really like Facebook chat, and why the company decided to break out the experience into a new app called Facebook Messenger. People like presence and instant chat. Basically, they want to know that you’re there at that exact moment.

Since that experience doesn’t exist on Twitter, Bonfire has created a killer extension for Chrome and Firefox that drops a chat layer on top of Twitter’s web experience. It uses its own chat infrastructure so it’ll work even when tweets are delayed and Twitter is having a tough time serving them up at all. After you install Bonfire, the service will look for all of your mutual connections that also use the service.

The chat window and “buddy list” are reminiscent of AOL instant messenger and every chat service thereafter, so it doesn’t take long to figure this thing out. Coupled with alert sounds for when you get a new message, this extension makes the Twitter site feel a lot more like a real-time social network in a way that Facebook nails.

If you don’t want to send someone a message and just want to ask a quick question, a throwaway chat is the perfect alternative. Depending on how many people you follow back on Twitter, you might be up to your ears in direct messages which also generate emails. This type of backup takes the real-time nature out of communication, so Bonfire has done a great job of bringing that to Twitter with this extension.

➤ Bonfire.im

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

When it comes to picking movies to watch on Netflix, I rely heavily on the ratings that other people give them. I’m not a fan of the 5-star rating system used by Netflix, but love the system used by Rotten Tomatoes.

I mostly browse for movies to add to my Netflix queue on the Netflix site itself, so to find out more information about recommended movies, I have to copy and paste to Google it, search on Rotten Tomatoes, or use a service like Moviegr.am before I make the decision to watch it later.

Luckily, one developer decided to wed the two together with a Chrome extension called “Rotten Netflix“. The extension is extremely lightweight and saves me quite a bit of steps when it comes to finding out what people really think about the movie I’m considering spending two or three hours watching.

Tomatoes are better than stars

Once you install the extension, the ratings from Rotten Tomatoes are inserted underneath the movies on the Netflix site. The great thing about Chrome extensions is that developers can hack away and insert things into pages and once you see the final product, it comes off as seamless. That’s exactly what this extension does perfectly.

The scores from Rotten Tomatoes sit right underneath the movie images and don’t require any clicks or hovering to see. If you use the Netflix site often, this is going to save quite a bit of time for you as well as help you pick movies for your queue.

The only thing I wish the extension did was show me some more information if I hover over the score, so that I don’t have to click away to the Rotten Tomatoes site, but that’s just me being picky.

If you’re looking for new titles to watch while you’re off for the Holidays, let this extension help you with your decision-making.

➤ Rotten Netflix