Full disclosure: AOL is DownloadSquad's parent company
AOL has been busy re-tooling itself ever since head honcho Tim Armstrong took the reigns, and one area that has received a lot of attention is social networking and content discovery. Lifestream is, perhaps, AOL's biggest social app, and now there's a second: Offsite.
Currently, Offsite is available as an extension for Google Chrome. Once installed, simply click the icon in your Omnibar (or the folded-over page corner in the top left) to load the Offsite overlay. The page you're currently viewing slides down and to the right, with relevant tweets taking the left column and related posts from other websites appears at the top (image after the break). A stream of trending topics is also shown, and Digg, Twitter, and AOL Mail sharing buttons are provided. Offsite also displays the page's "heat index," giving you a vague idea how popular it is right now.
Unlike AOL Lifestream for Chrome, Offsite loads in a flash. While it's handy in its current state, I'd like to see the sharing options tweaked. Facebook should be an option, and support for other email providers (and even the good old mailto:) would be a welcome improvement.
I'd also like to see this implemented as a bookmarklet so that users of other browsers can use Offsite -- which shouldn't be hard, given the nature of most Chrome extensions.
AOL has been busy re-tooling itself ever since head honcho Tim Armstrong took the reigns, and one area that has received a lot of attention is social networking and content discovery. Lifestream is, perhaps, AOL's biggest social app, and now there's a second: Offsite.
Currently, Offsite is available as an extension for Google Chrome. Once installed, simply click the icon in your Omnibar (or the folded-over page corner in the top left) to load the Offsite overlay. The page you're currently viewing slides down and to the right, with relevant tweets taking the left column and related posts from other websites appears at the top (image after the break). A stream of trending topics is also shown, and Digg, Twitter, and AOL Mail sharing buttons are provided. Offsite also displays the page's "heat index," giving you a vague idea how popular it is right now.
Unlike AOL Lifestream for Chrome, Offsite loads in a flash. While it's handy in its current state, I'd like to see the sharing options tweaked. Facebook should be an option, and support for other email providers (and even the good old mailto:) would be a welcome improvement.
I'd also like to see this implemented as a bookmarklet so that users of other browsers can use Offsite -- which shouldn't be hard, given the nature of most Chrome extensions.
The Offsite header bar
Offsite for Google Chrome helps you discover related content originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 28 Oct 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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