So what about Google+? The newest entry to the social network major leagues is taking a page from Twitter’s handbook, letting third-party application developers do all of the heavy lifting. But instead of letting these new feature coalesce into full-blown clients that render the first-party experience obsolete, these improvements are being channeled into extensions for Google’s Chrome browser.
The result (ideally) is a robust, evolving feature set that’s easy to customize, doesn’t overwhelm the user and doesn’t make the core experience completely irrelevant.
The downside to this approach is that Google hasn’t done a great job of letting users know they can improve their experience with plug-ins — and it hasn’t made it easy to identify the most useful tools on the market. In the SmartBrief tradition of helping you figure out what really matters, here are what I consider to be the seven best Chrome Extensions on the market.
- Surplus: This plug-in is ideal for those times when you want to add a link or a comment to your Google+ stream, without running the risk of getting sucked in by all the cool stuff your friends are sharing. It adds a little button to the top of your browser, click it and you’ve got the full Google posting experience, with none of the distraction.
- Google+ Refined for Google Plus: There are a number of tools that promise to let you reconfigure your Google+ experience in some way. In my experience, most of them don’t work well. Google+ Refined isn’t the most ambitious style tool out there, but it’s functional and gives you the option to streamline the site and make a few minor visual tweaks that improve the look and feel of Google+.
- G+ Twitter for Google Plus: Gives you the ability to post your Google+ updates to Twitter, treating the competing social network as just another circle. I’m not necessarily in favor of linking all your social media accounts — I think each network has its own strengths and weaknesses and needs its own dedicated content. That said, if you want to tweet from Google+, this is the way to do it.
- RSS Share for Google Plus™ and Google Reader: The name really says it all. Use this to seamlessly share what you’re reading.
- G+Me for Google Plus: This lets you collapse all updates, making your Circles much, much easier to skim.
- Replies and More for Google+: This plug-in combines the share-to-other-networks functionality of the better known Extended Share for Google Plus with the neat feature to reply directly to the author of a comment.
- Helper for Google Plus: There are a bunch of plug-ins that promise to let you mark a post and save it for easy reference later. Unfortunately, they don’t work as advertised. But you know what does work? Delicious — that URL saving and sharing tool that was saved from oblivion by the founders of YouTube. And with “Helper” you can bookmark a Google+ post and mark it for further action, ensuring that you never let another important post fall by the wayside. As a bonus, this plug-in also features a translation tool and a bunch of other features.
- The downside of using browser plug-ins is that they can make a browser sluggish or prone to crashing if they conflict with one another. You may need to experiment a little to find the plug-in combination the works best for you.
- Google is constantly updating Google+ and plug-in makers are constantly updating their products to compensate. What works today may not work tomorrow.
- New plug-ins are being added all the time. By the time you read this, one of my recommendations may have been outclassed by a competitor. Once you have a feel for what you really need out of Google+, try adding and subtracting plug-ins to develop your own ideal user experience.