On the topic of ‘extremely niche extensions for Google Chrome,’ have I got a story for you. Now, a few of you will probably feel a certain degree of ire towards me for this comment, but…I have absolutely no idea who Derek Jeter is. Can’t say I particularly care all that much, either: the guy’s largely irrelevant to my day to day life, as I neither follow nor particularly care about the sport of Baseball.

Some people evidently do care, though- quite a bit. Enough that someone actually coded a Chrome extension known as “Jeter Filter.” It does pretty much what you’d expect it to do- it “quickly and carefully scours the net for any signs of Derek Jeter and removes him while you browse, making Jeter disappear…right before your very eyes. So, basically, it searches out and filters any website that involves the professional athlete once you’ve installed it. I’m curious as to what sort of parameters the extension operates on- would it filter out websites with phrases like “I hate Derek Jeter?” Would it block its own website? All valid questions, for sure.

Oh, and in case you were wondering; no, this extension isn’t a joke. It actually exists.

Anyway, according to the website,

Jeter Filter anonymously reports each webpage found to contain Derek Jeter to the awesome open metadata service FluidInfo. This means the more you use the Jeter Filter, the easier you make it for other developers worldwide to filter Jeter from their apps.

In short, the more Jeter you filter, the easier it is to filter more Jeter!

So…basically, the extension forms a database of Jeter-friendly sites. Alright, that’s cool, I guess?

In addition to blocking all mention of Mr. Jeter from whatever websites a user happens to visit, it also gives users a visual warning any time it finds the guy’s name on website, informing them that they should navigate away from the web page immediately.  It comes with three levels of filtering: mild, aggressive, and vindictive. According to the website, Mild is for those who “merely hate Derek Jeter,” Aggressive is “for those who really hate Derek Jeter,” and Vindictive is “for those who really, really, really hate Derek Jeter.”

Beyond the fact that he’s in pro baseball, I still have no idea who the hell Derek Jeter is.

via Total Pro Sports

So, I think an apology might be in order.

Few days ago, I profiled what seemed to be a pretty awesome extension known as Google+Facebook. What it purported to do was allow you to view your Facebook news feed and information from your Google + account.  And to be fair, it did that.  All in all, a pretty useful tool. Problem was, there were a few rather unpleasant functions in the extension’s code, the presence of which pretty much inarguably paints it as Malware. Credit goes to RogueDarkJedi on Reddit for pointing it out to the community, and a fellow named Martin for pointing it out to me on this post

So, What’s the problem?

Roguedarkjedi over on Reddit decided he’d pop open the extension and take a look at some of the inner coding. What he found was rather…distressing, to say the least. After looking into Crossrider (and the exchange between Koby Menachemi and RogueDarkJedi), there’s a few red flags and warning lights that are positively screaming in my head about this one.  And most of them actually have nothing to do with RDJ’s findings.

1. Crossrider, the platform responsible for distributing Google+Facebook, evidently doesn’t have an up to date privacy policy. That right there? Huge red flag. Attempting to click their “terms and conditions” link at the bottom of the page takes you here. That in itself would be bad enough….but there’s more.
2. After continuallyevading questions and comments regarding the extension, Mr. Menechemi rather unprofessionally resorted to (ironically, rather rudely) calling RDJ uncivil, and apparently started using Sockpuppet accounts to try to support his side. Oh, and he apparently lies. A lot. Not exactly the sort of behavior you’d except from a business professional, is it?
3. This:“It actively (and at random) looks for known webmail domains and starts reading your emails until it hits a quote block which it then uses to append a signature to your emails in order to get your friends to start using this software.” Not. Sodding. Cool. Oh, but it’s okay- that feature was only available in the old API. The new API doesn’t let devs access it. If that’s the case, then why in the bleeding hell is the code still there, Koby-boy
4. Take a look at the Chrome Marketplace. And the Firefox App Store. Notice something missing? Crossrider’s extension hasn’t appeared on either site. Again, more red flags.
5. The fact that you have to go through the processes listed in this article to uninstall the extension is the final nail in the coffin. Any piece of software that forces you to jump through hoops to get rid of it is not okay, in my books.

At this point, I don’t even need to see the code for the extension- any business which conducts themselves in the sort of fashion that Crossrider has here is one that I want to stay the hell away from. But just for kicks, let’s take a look at some other things RDJ found wrong with the extension. (Note that he was looking at the Firefox coding- though the Chrome and IE9 extensions have similar issues) I’ve copied all of his comments into categories.

Malware: The API makes multiple references to a premium service. What this means is that if the author of the plugin fails to pay the service money, CrossRider can force all users of the plugin to install additional crap. This is a forced change that you cannot opt-out of. Several mentions in the code to overriding your browser homepage. There is one place where I see this happen, but I don’t know if any function actually calls it. Uninstalling will not revert any of these changes. The “Easy to Uninstall” part on their page is bullshit. Premium or not, the only clean up made from their uninstaller is their pref branch, which does fairly little. There is no restoration of the changes like the search plugin, the search settings or your homepage.

Privacy: This addon sends browser stats while it is on the manage screen. Data sent is the browser type, addon version, script version and this value called bic (which I assume is supposed to be unique [considering it only gets set after receiving data from the server]). It might do this in other places as well. Your FB data does go through their service.

Security: There are a ton of content permission hacks in order to mount remote JS and run it at a higher permission level. It’s rather lame considering Mozilla gives you safe interfaces that allow you to do this safely.

Privacy, Security, And Malware: You have no idea when this file will change. It’s downloaded at start up and ran with window chrome permissions (this is considered dangerous). At any point in time, the author could basically say fuck you and change it to start data mining. But that’s okay, because the change will happen in the background without you ever knowing. Ever

I’ve seen enough. You can find the rest of RDJ’s examination of the extension on the reddit thread. A user known as crow1170, who initially started off suspicious of RDJ’s claims did a similar examination of the code in the IE addon…let’s just say he’s on RDJ’s side now.

How do I get rid of it?

Gadgets Magazine was helpful enough to compile instructions (presumably all from the reddit thread) on how to get this crap off of your system if you made the mistake of downloading it.

FIREFOX:

Uninstall the add-on via the Firefox add-ons manager.

Go to about:config.

Reset all the values in about: config for the following:

• browser.search.selectedEngine
• browser.search.defaulturl
• browser.search.defaultenginename
• keyword.URL

CHROME:

Go to tools.

Select extensions.

Select Google+Facebook and hit uninstall.

IE9

Press alt, select tools.

Click on manage extensions.

Find Google+Facebook and press disable.

Via Gadgets Magazine, Reddit

So you’re browsing, and you come across something pretty cool. Maybe it’s an interesting article. Could be it’s an entertaining picture. Hell, maybe you discovered the meaning of life. Whatever you’ve found, you want to share it with your followers on Twitter. Problem is, there isn’t a ‘tweet’ button on this great find. As a result, you’re going to have to navigate all the way to Twitter, log in, copy the link, then share it through the site. Such a process wastes valuable minutes that could be spent finding more noteworthy quotes, articles, or pictures.

If you’re using Chrome, I’ve got a solution for you.

Shareaholic’s made a rather awesome extension for Google Chrome known as “The Tweet Button.”  It’s not the only twitter app out there, but I don’t think I’m far off in calling it the granddaddy of all Twitter apps. Not only does it let you tweet things directly to your account; it also features URL shortening and tracking, support for tweeting from multiple accounts, an official tweet count for every web page you visit, and-here’s the coolest part- the ability to share a link by right clicking and selecting “Tweet this” from the context menu. Word is, this feature was just added on Sunday. It opens up the tweet box-complete with the aforementioned url shortening- in much the same way as simply clicking the extension’s icon does.

I’m hoping that at some point in the future, they add the ability to tweet a specific section of a website by right clicking- for now, the context menu option is just a useful feature that saves the effort of having to move to the top right corner to tweet a page- makes the extension feel a bit more streamlined, and makes it quicker to use- if only by a few seconds.

Anyway, as for instructions on using the extension….All you need to do after installing it is connect it to your Twitter account, and you’re good to go.

You can download the Tweet Button For Chrome here.

I’ve gotta say, Google + is pretty awesome. Google’s privacy foibles aside; I’m loving it, and I’m immensely looking forward to when it finally launches. Just the same though…no matter how good something is, there are always improvements you can make to it.  No, I’m not talking about changes to the platform itself- Google’s not yet released the developer’s kit, to my knowledge. I’m instead referring to improvements upon the experience, by integration of Google’s newest social networking platform with its excellent web browser, Google Chrome.  And not just simple integration, either.

I’m talking about a lot more.

See, even though G+ has only been out for about two weeks now, a number of hardworking independent developers and designers have already released a number of extensions that not only bring the Google + experience closer to Google Chrome, but improve upon that experience in some rather excellent ways. If you’re using Google + with the Chrome browser, these addons are inarguably all worth a look. Now, those of you not using Chrome don’t have to feel left out, either- there are a number of addons like Greasemonkey, Stylish, and Greasekit that’ll let you run these extensions even if you don’t want to bother taking a few minutes to download and install Chrome.  Anyway, let’s have a look, shall we?

Google + Commander

Here’s the thing about a lot of us Google Geeks- hell, computer geeks in general. We love hotkeys. And why shouldn’t we? They’re simple and convenient, and make an already efficient and streamlined task or process fly by even more quickly. Google kind of made a bit of an oops in this regard. I want you guys to think of every single keyboard command you’re aware of in Google +. Hell, let’s do a bit of an experiment: Name ten. And no, not browser commands, either- keyboard commands specially tailored for G+.

You can’t do it, can you?

The creators of the Google + Commander Userscript realized fairly quickly that Google + doesn’t offer much for us command happy tech geeks, and they quickly set to work putting together a script that installed the following keyboard commands:

* c to comment
* s to share
* + to +1
* gg to go to top.
* G to go to bottom.
* n to show notification panel.
* i to focus to a form of new entry.
* esc to close current active textbox.
* gh to go to Home.
* gP to go to Photos.
* gp to go to Profile.
* gc to go to Circles.

Not too shabby, eh?

Google+ Header Hider

The Google bar is great. I’m not denying that. It’s efficient, functional, and easy to use. But what if, for some reason, you wanted to hide it? Make it invisible when you were’t using it in order to save space in your browser? That’s precisely what Google Header Hider does. It basically turns on autohide for the Google bar- meaning that when you aren’t using it, it’s tucked out of the way, but you can mouse over the area where was to make it pop up. This’ll work for pretty much any website the Google bar appears on. Pretty nifty, no?

Google+ Enhancer

The folks behind the userscript improvements weren’t satisfied just stopping at the autohide feature. Oh no. They wanted to do more with Google +-much more. See, they figured that there are actually several other functionalities and features that were missing from the Google Bar. Naturally, resourceful folk that they are, they set right out to rectify their concerns. The Enhancer usercript adds unread counts for Gmail, Calendar, and Reader, thus connecting you to your Google account in such a way that Google curiously forgot to do.

Google+ Facebook

I actually just recently covered this one. You can read my article on the subject here. Basically, this one is designed for those of you who want to remain active on Facebook while switching over to Google +- thus providing something of a panacea for the sting of ditching a social network where you’ve had years to get entrenched and make friends. Installing the Google + Facebook browser plugin will add a new icon next to the Google + default pages on Google’s site. Clicking it will show your your Facebook news feed, without forcing you to return to Zuckerberg’s site in order to read it. Nice.

Update: Hold off on installing this one for now, folks. Fellow on Reddit by the name of RogueDarkJedi looked through the code, and his conclusions were…distressing, to say the least. Turns out, Google+Facebook could potentially be malware. Assuming the developer response he received for his original post is legit…let’s just say it doesn’t look good. I’m going to do a bit more research on the matter- I’ll keep you folks posted. For the time being, it would be best to err on the side of caution.

Surplus for Google Chrome

I recently spoke of this extension, as welll. Long story short, it lets you access the basics of your Google + profile without taking you back to the site to do so. Granted, there are a few glitches with it at the moment, but the developer’s working hard to repair them.

Google+ -> Contrast, Denser, More Features

Here’s an addition to the list that’s more stylistic than functional. It adjusts the layout of Google + to be more ergonomic in design, making it easier to use many of the feature on Google’s website. Basically, it totally refines the layout of the website. I’m hoping that Google works out some way to adjust personalize the layout of Google + at some point in the future- perhaps something involving widgets, and the ability to change the theme as you can in Gmail- but for now, this’ll do quite nicely as far as improving the look of the site- even though it’s not exactly an ugly duckling to begin with.

And there you have it. A few apps and extensions that are pretty much guaranteed to improve on your Google + experience.

Via Extreme Tech

Well, that didn’t take long. Facebook’s already blocked Mohamed Mansour’s Facebook Friend Exporter. Apparently they did take notice of the Chrome extension, and didn’t much appreciate what it was doing. Fancy that. As expected, no legal action was taken against Mansour.

He’s definitely not happy with this turn of events, though. He added the following message onto his extensions info page:

CRITICAL UPDATE:

Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove emails of your friends from your profile by today July 5th 2011. It will no longer work for many people.

New version with a different design is currently deploying. You might have to do exports daily. It uses a different approach, and I will maintain this version. Just bear with me.

According to Mansour, the fact that Facebook’s removed emails from their mobile site (evidently critical to the extension’s original design) has crippled the extension. What’s more, they’ve added a sort of ‘throttling’ mechanism: Basically, if you visit one of your friend’s pages five times in a short period, the email field is removed. “Facebook is actually hiding data (email) from you to see when your friends explicitly shared that to you, making it really hard to scrape because the only missing data is your emails, and that is your friends identity. Nothing else is” Mansour said to CNet’s Emil Protalinski in an email message. He also shared the following post on his Google + Profile:

I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves Facebook owns every users data on Facebook. You don’t own anything! If I were you, I would riot this to the media outlets again. Seriously … more motivation to figure out a different approach.

Guess it's back to using Yahoo

While I don’t agree with the method Facebook’s used to block the app, it really can’t come as any surprise to anyone that they did. Like I said, the extension violates Facebook’s ToS- which all Facebook users agreed to on signup. Truthfully, I’m surprised they haven’t started banning accounts. If Mansour manages to find a workaround, that may well be their next step. Now, contrary to what a lot of folks are saying, Facebook has in fact set up a service that allows users to download their data and information.

What you’ll need to do is go to Account->Account Settings->Download Your Information->Learn More->Download. This will transfer wall posts, photos, and friend data to your computer. Unfortunately, it’s not particularly user-friendly- it’s all clumped together into one big chunk of information.

I guess it’s back to using Yahoo- at least until Mansour finds a way around this latest hurdle.

Via CNET

One problem a lot of people have cited with Google’s new social network startup is the fact that most of Facebook’s users are, well…rather entrenched in the social networking website. Leaving Facebook means leaving their entire network of friends and acquaintances behind, in a sense. That’s always the problem with any social networking site- switching from one platform to another means you might often have to spend hours rebuilding your web of contacts; hunting down their information, adding their contact information to yours…either that, or you’re going to be dividing your attention between the two websites. Not exactly a tempting prospect, is it? Given how much work moving from Facebook could be, is it any wonder a lot of people might just want to stay put?

Ah, but there’s a solution- or at the very least, a small boon- for this conundrum. Switching from Facebook to Google + need not mean you fall out of touch with all your friends. An extension for Google + just recently went live to make the process of moving over from Facebook far, far smoother. Developed by a fellow known as Mohamed Mansour, this extension’s called, quite fittingly, the Facebook Friend Exporter.

The Facebook Friend Exporter

The tool’s actually pretty simple to use. Once you’ve installed it into Chrome, the first thing you’re going to want to do is log in to Facebook- making sure that you’ve got your default language set to English ( Friend Exporter isn’t available in any other language yet). Next, you’ll have to make sure you don’t have SSL enabled, and ensure you’re using HTTP. Then, disable all your Facebook extensions- there’s a few that can interfere with the extension’s operation or outright break it. Finally, once you’ve refreshed, you’ll see an “export” button on the Facebook toolbar. Click it, and you’ll be able to gain access to your friends names, emails, phone numbers, screen names, websites, addresses, and birthdays. This data can be exported in either a CSV file, or sent straight to your Gmail contacts.

Granted, if you have upwards of two hundred friends, sorting them into circles can still be a bit of a pain, but to be completely honest; it’s better than the alternative.

"I am scraping into my own data that my Facebook friends allowed me to use and view. Facebook doesn't own my friends."

The creator of the extension feels that users should have ownership of their own online data, and their own friendship. He’s made no secret of his ire towards Facebook in this regard. In a Google + conversation regarding the extension, Mansour stated simply, “I am scraping into my own data that my Facebook friends allowed me to use and view. Facebook doesn’t own my friends. I want my friends to be in a place that is easily accessible, extractable, and shareable. And if that results in a ban/termination, so be it.” Even the description of his app is demonstrative of his opinion:

Get *your* data contact out of Facebook, whether they want you to or not. You gave them your friends and allowed them to store that data, and you have right to take it back out! Facebook doesn’t own my friends

Something tells me that’s not going to sit well with Facebook. How do I know? Because of this line from the TOS: “You will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.” Something tells me if you’re caught using this extension, you might just be shunted out of Facebook with an account ban. Then again, if you’re using this extension, you’re probably jumping ship anyway.

Facebook’s Data Policies

Honestly; this sort of thing just underscores one of the key differences between Google and Facebook. While Google seems to be very geared towards openness, allowing users ownership of their own data, Facebook is on the other end of the street. To be fair, Facebook’s improved their privacy policy from what it used to be. Then again, that probably has more to do with the fact that several world governments browbeat them into it, rather than any actual concern for user privacy. Just the same, at the end of the day, users don’t necessarily have one hundred percent ownership of their own data.

Although Mansour feels that the data-export policies on Facebook are, for lack of better terms, a farce; he still provides a note of caution for users, informing them that they should use the Facebook Friend Exporter at their own risk. “From the 30K+ users who used it, no one got a ban notice from Facebook, but I don’t guarantee that,” Mansour said. I’d most definitely agree with him, there. At the end of the day, however disagreeable Facebook’s data policies might be, however stilted their privacy policy is, every user on Facebook still accepted the terms when they signed up. Using the Friend Exporter counts as a breach of contract, and Facebook is legally well within rights to terminate one’s account for using this extension- even if morally, they’re in a pretty gray area.

Facebook’s yet to offer a public comment on their opinion of the tool- even though it’s already been downloaded over 15,000 times. Then again, considering that Facebook has a userbase of over seven hundred million, it might not even be on their radar right now. Maybe it’ll start getting a bit more attention once Google + releases to the general public and more users begin to migrate over. Could be that that’s what it’ll take for Facebook to take action against the extension- and possibly its creator.

As for what’s going to happen when Facebook does notice…I haven’t the foggiest. I doubt they’ll take legal action against Mansour, but who can say?

Final Thoughts

Naturally, this extension isn’t perfect. While there might eventually be an extension that allows users to copy over pictures from Facebook to Google +, the Facebook Friend exporter does not. It only nabs contact information. So any user created content that’s currently on Facebook is going to stay on Facebook- unless, that is, the folks using Facebook manually export the files themselves. Bit of a pain, but that’s going to be a problem with any social networking startup. And honestly, I don’t think we can really consider Google + to have even ‘started up’ yet- remember that it’s still in beta, and the invite process is…well, kind of backwards at the moment.

Those of you who want to nab the extension for yourself can get it here.
Via Cnet

Even though Google Music is still in its beta stages (which it entered only recently), there’s already extensions appearing for it- albeit unofficial ones. So, basically, this is one of those ‘install at your own risk’ scenarios- though I can hardly see how this app would be harmful. Then again, I guess all it takes is a few mixed up lines of code to lock up a program. Plus, it’s still in beta, just like the API it’s attached to.

Developed by Level 2 studios, “Better Music Beta” allows you to listen to your Google Music from your browser without needing to open the Google Music website. You can also song scrobble (a rather bizarre word that essentially translates to you sending information about a song you’re enjoying to a website where it’s added to your profile), “love” songs on Last.FM, give songs a thumbs up/down, show desktop notifications, switch playlists and so on and so forth. Sounds pretty cool, right?

Just want to emphasize, though- this app isn’t going to work for you if you aren’t already in the Google Music Beta. Sorry, folks. If you were hoping for an app that would approximate the beta experience for those without an invite…this isn’t it.

If you’ve got a Google Music account, swing by the Google Webstore to grab yourself a copy of the extension.

via Chrome Story

There are over 8,000 Chrome extensions available from the official Google directory which is a great thing to see since they have been available last December. Some of the best extensions seem to come from Google employees, as their motivation is to create features that make the Google experience even better. Today, Google has release three new ones related to Google Calendar, Apps and YouTube.

Calendar Extension

This extension adds functionality for your Google Calendar right into the browser. It’s useful because I know from experience that I hate having to open up a new browser window to check my calendar or to add events in. With this, I’m able to just click on the icon and get the information I need, plus certain sites like Facebook can integrate events. You can even pull up a quick Google Map to find locations.

Web Clipboard

This makes use of the Google Web Clipboard, a feature that is in Apps. With this, your data is stored across multiple tabs. This seems interesting because it gives you a listing of recently copied items, which you can clear out at your own discretion. I can remember many times when I wanted to retrieve some text I had copied earlier, and since I do practically everything in the browser anyways this is great.

YouTube Feed

I’m always trying to find the best new videos on Google, Chrome and cloud computing topics for this blog. So having YouTube Feed is something I’m definitely going to try out because it will notify me when one of my friends on YouTube uploads a new video. It would be great if one could search for the newest videos via keyword here, but I’ll just hope that they will make that a part of the extension in the future.

via Google Chrome Blog

The upcoming launch of the Chrome Web Store will replace the existing official Chrome extensions site and place both webapps and extensions under one single directory. But for many people, there is some difficulty in distinguishing the difference between applications and extensions.

In order to stave off any confusion, an article has been published in Google’s Code Labs to help explain the difference. Basically, an application is something that has its own UI and is displayed in the browser window. Separately, extensions notify and otherwise enhance the web experience.

The article also explains further for developers’ proper packaging standards in the “.crx” format as well as information about permissions for auto-updating. What’s interesting as well is the difference between hosted apps and packaged apps, whereby the latter will be able to run web applications off of the hard drive while the former simply directs a user to a secure web location using a manifest.json file.

Packaged apps offer an interesting bridge between extensions and hosted apps. They contain all of the elements needed to run the webapp, but right off of the internal storage. This is a smart way to run things; many believe that everything will run off of bandwidth which is not completely true and will help to give users a better experience in some cases.

ArsTechnica has an excellent article discussing a Stanford research project that was conducted regarding browser “privacy” modes. In Chrome, this is called Incognito mode. For Firefox, it is called Private Browsing. In Internet Explorer it’s called InPrivate. Despite the label for it, this method of using the web is a bit misleading by claiming it offers protections against companies mining data from browsing.

We’ve got to step back and look at this from a different perspective here: when we are browsing the internet, we’re leaking data about ourselves all over the place. The web is a two way street: from the moment you start using it you are inputting data about yourself. You open a browser – regardless of the mode – and you start searching, logging in to services and clicking on links.

A major problem also appears to be add-ons and extensions in the browser, since they are capable of saving data themselves. I had previously talked about Google being very careful to look over extensions before adding them to the Official Extensions site, but perhaps they are only concerned about extensions that have potential elevation privileges that can attack a PC.

So perhaps in all of this internet business we have lost an element of privacy. There is still some degree of anonymity, but it may not last much longer. Some believe we should get rid of all anonymous use of the internet in order to legitimize it – but can that really be done?