Yoono, I no, we all no!

Found this (so far) decent looking plugin for Firefox called Yoono.  It’s basically a sidebar that displays updates from a plethora of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed and more.  Found it when I was reading an article from the geniuses at makeuseof.com about managing social networks.

So far it’s worked out nicely for me.  I am on a bunch of different social networking sites and have always been on a quest to find that all inclusive holy grail of desktop social network agregators.  Granted, this isn’t a true desktop application but it’s close enough for me since I typically have at least one browser window open at all times (who doesn’t nowadays?).  So now not only am I getting popup notifications any time someone updates their facebook/myspace/twitter status but (and I think this is one of the best parts of the plugin) I also get notified when a friend has Dugg a new story (through FriendFeed).

Other great features about this awesome add on is that you can update your status on any of the sites without having to load a separate page in your browser, share whole sites or selections from sites directly through it as well.  There is also a neat search feature which I admittedly have not explored as much as I would like to but it seems to be a promising feature as well.  Finally, as if all the cool features I just mentioned isn’t enough, it also connects you to all major chat clients (AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live, Yahoo Messenger) so you can chat within the sidebar as well.  Overall it looks like a strong contender to be a popular, in-browser method to stay up to date on all of my social networks. One downside of the plugin is that it is currently only available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, no love for Safari users yet.  This, plus a few other factors have made me take a second look at Firefox.

Now I’ve always been a Safari girl myself but I’ve always been drawn to the fact that Firefox has so many add-ons to help customize your web browsing experience.  So now that I’ve found Yoono and Firefox has finally updated to 3.5 I’ve decided to give Firefox a fair shot.  As of tody Firefox will now be my default browser and will remain that way for at lest 3 weeks if not more.  Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose are doing the same thing with Bing by setting it as their default search engine for awhile to really see if they like it better than Google – I’ll wait to hear their verdict before I make the attempted move to Bing, little changes at a time!