Google Chrome is quickly gaining popularity as the perfect alternative to other heavyweights like Internet Explorer and Firefox. The browser war has been going on since the mid-1990′s and choosing a ‘side’ has always come down to a few factors: who’s faster, who’s lighter and who’s the most compatible. Google Chrome seems to beat the other two on all three fronts. And with Extensions, functionality just keeps getting better and better.

For those of you with WordPress blogs, you can now offer your readers the ability to install a Chrome Extension right into their browser that allows them to see your latest RSS feeds without even having to go to your site! This is a great tool for people who don’t regularly subscribe to RSS feeds, but want to know when you create new content. Once I create my own extension, I’ll post a guide here, but for now, check out the detailed one over at 9lessons.info.

Viewing WordPress Stats

You can now install a Chrome extension that will show you live stats for your blog! After you install it, all you need to configure it is your blog domain and your API key. To get your API key if you already have it, go to WordPress.com, login and view your profile. If you’re using Akismet for blocking spam comments, you can get that API key by clicking on the Akismet plugin configuration under Plugins in your WordPress admin.

Once this information is entered, Google Chrome will display a number counter in the upper right corner of your browser. This count will update periodically with the latest stats on your site. When you click on this number, you get a drop-down box that displays the following:

• Referrers – These are the website links that have forwarded a visitor onto your site.
• Top Posts – This list shows you the top posts on your site for the day.
• Search Terms – This is a handy list that shows you what search terms brought people to your site.
• Clicks – Now you see the actual clicks that people used to get to your site right from your browser!

Note that this extension only works if you have WordPress Stats enabled on your site. It also only supports one blog at the moment. In time, there may be options to input data from multiple blogs.

Get the WordPress Stats Extension now!

Comment Moderation

Now here’s a extension worth getting if you’re having trouble moderating all those post comments! With this extension, you can moderate blog comments on one or more blogs directly from Chrome. You no longer have to login to your WP admin to filter out the bad from the good.

With it, you can see all comments that are marked as approved, pending or spam. It also shows you the total comments you have and compares them right on screen to your other blog sites.

Get the WordPress Checker extension now!

My two cents

These are just three of the quickest ways to interact with your blog and to allow your readers to stay updated at all time with your site. I hope that in time, multiple blogs will be fully supported by these extensions with the ability to manage all of them through a simple interface. I also like the fact that extensions are less-intrusive than browser toolbars and seem to be more user-friendly.

When I think of Twitter, the last thing I think of is advertising—at least in the sense of banners, pop-ups, sponsored links, etc. I figured the only advertising one would benefit from on Twitter would be that of sending out tweets promoting their new products or services.

However, it seems that Twitter will start allowing bigtime advertisers to use APIs for their advertising campaigns. Speculation indicates that the ad system will work in two ways:

1. Promoted tweets – An advertiser can search for any tweet on Twitter and sponsor it. After paying the advertising dollars, an ad is placed alongside that tweet and sent out to the world.
2. Promoted accounts – An advertiser has the option of promoting its own account to users. This may be accomplished by linking advertisers to users that tweet contend related to the company’s products or services. This, in turn would allow a user to be presented with a new account to follow that will likely be of some interest to the user.

Twitter says the details haven’t been completely hammered out, but they intend on increasing ad revenue which is currently expected to reach $150 million this year. While Twitter only has about 200 million registered users, Facebook has over 600 million and expects to rake in $4 billion in ad revenue this year!

While it’s tempting for the five-year old Twitter to do everything in its power to increase revenue, some say that bombarding users with ads, especially useless ads, will cause a decrease in user interaction and/or user decline.

Part of the problem could end up being how ads are generated, delivered and received throughout the process. Unlike the traditional methods of advertising that are used by Google and Facebook, Twitter ads would have to utilize a different system altogether if it is to succeed. This is because most people don’t sit on Twitter and navigate from page to page like they can on Facebook.

Mobile viewers are now delivering tweets directly to phones just as if they were standard text messages. Ads would have to be tailored to fit this medium and more importantly prove to be effective.

My two cents

I’ve never been a fan of advertising, but I am a realist…none of us would know about anything that we know about if someone, somewhere didn’t see an ad for it or read about it. With that said, I’m willing to view ads as long as they are relevant and make sense to me. My concern with Twitter is the fact that MANY of those 200 million users are spammers, so what will be put in place to stop them from shotgunning lame ads to the whole community?

I probably shouldn’t assume anything until the “details” are hammered out, but naturally, I start thinking about the downsides to all this advertising. Another question I have is will users have a choice in whether their tweets can become sponsored with ads? Or if not, does the person who tweeted that sponsored message get a cut of the revenue? I’m curious to see how all this will unfold!

I have always been wondering when the demise of Facebook would start just like how MySpace quickly came and went along with other social networking sites like Bebo and Friendster. The old saying, “Nothing lasts forever” couldn’t be more true in the Internet world. In fact, you could easily change that to, “Nothing lasts 4 years.” Experts have already predicted that Facebook has already reached its peak and in time, members will slowly dwindle away. So what causes this? Well, a number of things could contribute to a website losing popularity. They could reach the pinnacle of their innovation, people can lose interest as they get older, younger people might find other things to do or maybe there are too many spammers and ads.

Whatever the case may be, we can guarantee that corporate America will always be there to ride the money-train as long as there are tracks to roll on. Enter Google Inc.

Google+

The latest competition to Facebook is by none other than Google. Of course like every other beta service they launch, it’s by invitation only and they are currently “at capacity”, but you can check out the Google+ Tour on their site. I won’t go over everything here, but I do want to touch on 3 of Google+’s features.

Circles

Circles is a way in which you can group your contacts into various categories. As an example, you can have your school friends, your drinking friends, your co-workers and your family members all in different circles. This is a neat feature that allows you to share specific information only with certain people.

On Facebook, if you write something on your wall, everyone gets to see it and we all know what kind of trouble that can cause!

Google describes circles as:

You share different things with different people. But sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life.

Sparks

Sparks allows you to tell Google about the things you’re interested in and as you would have guessed, they will bring you the latest search results and news updates related to these items. I like Google’s explanation much better:

Remember when your Grandpa used to cut articles out of the paper and send them to you? That was nice. That’s kind of what Sparks does: looks for videos and articles it thinks you’ll like, so when you’re free, there’s always something to watch, read, and share. Grandpa would approve.

Hangouts

I really like this feature because it allows you to join in conversations that your other friends are having at any time. It’s kind of like running into a friend at the store only now it’s online!

Bumping into friends while you’re out and about is one of the best parts of going out and about. With Hangouts, the unplanned meet-up comes to the web for the first time. Let buddies know you’re hanging out and see who drops by for a face-to-face-to-face chat. Until we perfect teleportation, it’s the next best thing.

My two cents

If there ever was a worth challenger to Facebook, I would imagine Google would be it. Google has just about every other service under the sun so it only seems fitting that they add a social networking site to the mix. After looking at what Google+ promises to offer, I think the experience will be far better than that of Facebook, but I also think Google will have a lot of catch up to do. As far as customers dropping off of Facebook in exchange for Google+—I don’t think that will happen. Personally, I’ll have a Google+ account and we’ll see how things go.

As for right now, I placed my name on the waiting list to be invited into the exclusive club. We’ll see what happens.