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Give Your Stream A New Look With G + Me For Google +

Posted on 21. Aug, 2011 by Nicholas Greene in Chrome, Features

Here’s another Chrome Extension that gives Google + a bit of a makeover. See, here’s the thing- as you get more and more people sharing posts with you, and begin to add more and more folks to your circles; your stream can start to feel a bit…overcrowded. Maybe a bit cluttered and overwhelming, to boot. When there’s a message with too many new comments on it, it could potentially dominate the entire stream- whether you care about those comments or not.

“G + Me For Google +” purports to enhance “the Google + web app to make it much easier to process a large stream of incoming posts and comments,” helping it to “unlock the potential of its real-time updates.” According to the developer, the extension adds the following features to Google + through Chrome:

1. Notification status visible at all times
2. Collapsible comments
3. Collapsible posts
4. Real-time comment count on collapsed items
5. Mark comments as read
6. Two available modes: Expanded and List.
7. Mouse-over instant preview(currently only available in List mode). 

Not only that, the developer’s also gone so far as to include a list of extensions and apps their addon’s compatible with. The only extension it’s incompatible with is Comment Toggle- but I’ve found I rather like this addon more than the former anyway- so it’s ultimately a nonissue. Now, there are evidently a few minor glitches with the extension- the ‘j’ and ‘k’ keyboard shortcuts don’t really sit well with the addon, and occasionally the comment count goes a little wonky as a result of people deleting their comments: In other words, you could very easily see a post with a comment count of zero or negative comment counts.

My Thoughts On The Extension:

I decided to take G + Me For Google + for a test run, and I’ve gotta say- I liked what I saw. First things first, I’ll explain the two formats to you. Expanded mode looks fairly similar to standard Google +, with one additional feature: each post in your stream has a small gray bar above it. Clicking on that bar will collapse the post down to a single row. You can also collapse or expand comments- which automatically marks the post as ‘read’ (more on that in a moment).   All in all, pretty nifty- and it works a hell of a lot better than Comment Toggle.

List mode is probably the coolest feature of this extension. See, in List mode, all of the posts in your stream are automatically collapsed down. Each collapsed item displays the name of the person who published it, the time at which it was published and the number of comments it has received. If you’ve already marked it as ‘read’ the comment box will be gray. If there are any unread comments, the comment box will be red.

If you want to focus on a single post in your stream, all you have to do is click on it. The post will expand, and any other post you happened to be looking at will automatically collapse. You can also mouse over posts to see them in an overlay on your screen-sort of like how +photo zoom zooms into pictures. All in all, it gives the feeling of having a sort of ‘Google + dashboard’ to work off of, and makes sorting through what can often amount to a massive volume of messages a far less daunting task.

You can grab G+Me For Google from the Chrome Web Store, as always.

Tags: Google + Chrome Addons, Google Chrome extensions