Two of the biggest trends we tracked last year were Mobile Web and Internet of Things . In a new series on ReadWriteWeb, which we're calling Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things , we'll explore how these two important trends are converging and look at some cutting edge example products. We start with barcode scanning... Internet of Things is when everyday objects become connected to the Internet, via technologies such as RFID tags, sensors and barcodes. One trend we saw expanding in 2008-09 was mobile phones being deployed as readers for barcodes . Sponsor Increasingly, smartphones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices offer applications that allow you to scan a barcode on a product or object and get more information about it. The Technology Barcodes are similar to RFID tags, in that they both hold data. RFID tags are generally more functional and flexible than barcodes . Also RFID tags can be read/write, whereas barcodes cannot. However the big advantage for barcodes is that they're cheaper, therefore we're more likely to see scanning as a consumer activity ramp up in the U.S. via barcodes. The most popular form of 2D barcode is the QR Code (the QR stands for "Quick Response"), which became popular in Japan and is now gaining traction in the U.S. and other markets. The Products In a series of posts written over September 2008, Sarah Perez analyzed the then burgeoning " scannable world ." As Sarah explained, barcode scanning is not a new technology on the Web. One of the first examples was :CueCat , a cat-shaped barcode reader from the late 1990s. It linked a user to a website by scanning a barcode in an article or other printed matter. CueCat never took off because it required a separate piece of hardware, but now in 2010 smartphones are the hardware . There's also no shortage of software circa 2010, such as ScanLife and the NeoReader app described in Part 2 of Sarah's Scannable World series . A variety of other barcode reading apps are listed in Part 3 of that series. There are a variety of use cases for barcodes on the Web. They include Semapedia.org (a non-profit project that aims to augment the physical world with Wikipedia data), QRContact (contact management via barcodes), and barcode wearables such as p8tch ("Think of it as a TinyURL you can wear"). But none of these is likely to become widely used in the mainstream, at least in the near future. What Will be The Tipping Point? In Japan, barcode scanning is already a popular activity thanks to the culture of using mobile phones for just about everything. In the U.S., where the Mobile Web took longer to ramp up, barcodes are yet to catch on. However there's one market where barcode scanning could become a mainstream activity in the U.S. and other countries. No, not magazine publishing - although there are valid advertising use cases there. We're talking about scanning retail products using your mobile phone . By the end of 2009, a lot of barcode scanning apps had gained popularity in the iPhone and Android, in particular. In November we listed our picks for scanning and other mobile shopping apps to test over Black Friday. There is no clear winner yet in the shopping scanning market, but here are some applications you may want to try: RedLaser (iPhone app getting rave reviews ) ShopSavvy (popular on Android) The Amazon Mobile app ; see also SnapTell , owned by Amazon StoreXperience CardStar pic2shop Point Inside ( good review on CNET ) CompareEverywhere (Android) ZXing Barcode Reader (Android) Thanks to followers of @rww on Twitter , who suggested some of those. Will Consumers Adopt Barcode Scanning? As well as adoption by retailers, another big question is: will consumers want to interact with real world products using their mobile phones? I suspect they will, once they begin to see compelling reasons for doing so - which will probably involve getting the best deals and being able to do advanced shopping comparison very easily. Finally, it's worth noting that Google is active in barcodes . Google's Favorite Places program allows local businesses to put a sticker on their products which features Google's logo, a scannable barcode and a message reading "We're a favorite place on Google." Barcode scanning and its applications will grow during 2010, meaning more and more real world data will be connected to the Internet and accessed on your mobile phone. There are many apps trying to entice consumers to wave their mobile phone in front of products, so let us know your favorites in the comments. Image credits: clevercupcakes ; Stan ; ScanLife Discuss

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Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things: Barcode Scanning

Being a technology blogger is like having a license for an around-the-clock gadget and Web addiction. No one expects you to leave your house during the day. You're allowed to spend the majority of your life in front of a glowing screen, and flipping out over WiFi issues is par for the course. And you're never far from the Web, since your mobile is always in hand when you have to leave your laptop behind for some incomprehensible reason. But even with such a license in hand, I have to make a case for periodically disconnecting. What do you think? Sponsor More and more, I am trying to set aside unplugged hours and even days for Internet-free, mobile-free, "Luddite time." Time for asking a stranger for directions, time for talking to the people you're with rather than the people you "follow," time for interacting with the world around you in ways that don't include clicking, scrolling or downloading. Time that's increasingly being destroyed by smart phones, "super" phones and what ever "super duper" devices are in the pipeline. Sitting in front of these glowing screens (as most of us do) for around eight hours a day for work and additional hours for leisure can't be good for us as living, breathing organisms. Have you ever spent the whole day absorbed in the web - the rabbit holes of YouTube, the breadcrumb trails of Wikipedia, the party line of Twitter and the bottomless virtual library of blog posts - to find yourself startled by actual human interaction, in a strange and unrestul intellectual state. With enough consecutive days of online-only living, you might realize you're making more connections between online entities and content, but you're losing opportunities to have fresh, original thought or observations about your own world. I'm not saying that the Internet makes you stupid. I am saying that, if left to run wild across the vast territories of the Web, your mind can turn into a laboratory hamster, frantically pulling levers and running in wheels while his environment remains essentially static and his motivations essentially artificial. Another detriment to a constantly wired life is that you're not truly present with the folks around you every day, and you begin to forget how polite, normal people communicate. You become too easily distracted by notifications from your mobile, glazing over and tuning out to parse your RSS feeds while real conversations are going on without you. And being accustomed to ignoring your surroundings in favor of your online life numbs you to the fact that often, your friends are doing the same to you. If you've ever sat through a dinner with your significant other or a group of geek friends as you all happily tapped away on your mobiles, you know this is true. And while being able to buck conventional table manners and geek out together is a wonderful thing, aren't you cheating yourself out of valuable face-to-face interaction by doing so? And very often, an preoccupation with the Web leads to a total loss of perspective. If you have ever stayed awake until 2 or 3 in the morning entrenched in a furious debate on Scoble's FriendFeed over something that the entire world had completely forgotten 12 hours later (guilty!), you have definitely lost perspective. Not typically the most empathetic people, we begin to give more attention and emotion to minor tech events (Google Wave, anyone?) than to major world events. If it didn't trend on Twitter and hit Digg's front page, we tend to not notice or care. Although the social web can occasionally be used as a power for good, notably through efforts such as those carried out during the Iranian election/debacle or on World Aids Day, this circle is notoriously self-obsessed and navel-gazing to the obfuscation of much more important matters. Finally, being constantly online is probably fairly bad for your health. A few of the people I've spoken to tonight tell me that to distract themselves from Internet obsessions, they turn to physical activity, such as gym workouts, yoga or running. These dear souls are escaping the sedentary lifestyle to which we've all grown fairly accustomed and which most certainly has negative effects on how we look, how we feel, our metabolism and energy level and so much more. And although mobile and AR technologies are making it easier for us to get out and about while still connected, more often they act as a tether to larger, more stationary devices. I personally want to spend many hours in 2010 offline and off my mobile. I want to do things like watch an old movie, go for a walk, have a dinner date or read an honest-to-god newspaper without checking in on Foursquare or posting an "overheard" on Twitter. Maybe it's a sign that I'm aging. Many of my contemporaries say their sole offline time is sleeping. I've certainly lived that way, too, and I spend many days now online for 14-18 hours. But I don't want every day to be like that. What about you, dear readers? Do you currently plan for and enforce offline hours for yourself, your significant other or your family? If so, how and when do you take your breaks? Or are you a tireless defender of the Internet junkie lifestyle? Most importantly, what do you see as the explicit benefits or detriments of being online around the clock - or of taking periodic furloughs? Let us know your opinions and best practices in the comments. Discuss

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Open Thread: Should Tech Get a Turn-Off?

In what has become a Christmas tradition, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales posted a personal appeal for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation earlier this month. On the first day alone, the nonprofit raised $430,000 from 13,000 people. Today, Wales announced that Wikimedia reached its fundraising goals. In total, the foundation managed to raise $7.5 million. Last year, when Wales posted a similar appeal, the Wikimedia Foundation received $6.2 million from 125,000 donors. Sponsor Still No Ads Wikipedia and other Wikimedia properties like Wikiquote or Wikibooks could easily find enough advertisers to finance these sites. In order to remain as independent and impartial as possible, however, the Wikimedia Foundation prefers to rely on donations from users. It is worth noting, though, that the Wikipedia does have deals with some other companies like France Telecom's Orange . These businesses license the site's content and share advertising revenue with the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation has fewer than 35 employees and needs roughly $10 million per year to operate. About 340 million users access Wikipedia per month. According to Wales, this represents "almost a third of the Internet-connected world." Discuss

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$7.5 Million: Wikipedia Reaches Fundraising Goal

During my trip to Boston earlier this year, I had the opportunity to visit MIT. At the end of a long day of meetings with various MIT tech masterminds, I made my way to the funny shaped building (see photo right-below) where the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its director Tim Berners-Lee work. Berners-Lee is of course the man who invented the World Wide Web 20 years ago. This was my first meeting with the Web's creator, whose work and philosophy was a direct inspiration for me when I launched ReadWriteWeb back in 2003. 1 Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! After shaking hands, I told Tim Berners-Lee that this blog's name was in part inspired by the first browser, which he developed, called " WorldWideWeb ". That was a read/write browser; meaning you could not only browse and read content, but create and edit content too. It was a shame then when Mosaic, a read-only browser, became the first mainstream Web browser in the mid-90s. It wasn't until the rise of Web 2.0 that the read/write philosophy gained widespread acceptance. 2 On that note, we launched into the interview... Note: the interview was published in two parts, with Part 1 on the topic of Linked Data. Part 2 explored other topics and can be found here . How Linked Data Relates to The Semantic Web RWW: Earlier this year you gave an inspiring talk at TED about Linked Data . You described Linked Data as a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself - i.e. we've gone from a Web of documents to a web of data. Can you please explain though how Linked Data relates to the Semantic Web, is it a subset of it? TBL: They fit in completely, in that the linked data actually uses a small slice of all the various technologies that people have put together and standardized for the Semantic Web. Linked Data uses a small slice of the technologies that make up the Semantic Web. We started off with the Semantic Web roadmap, which had lots of languages that we wanted to create. [However] the community as a whole got a bit distracted from the idea that actually the most important piece is the interoperability of the data. The fact that things are identified with URIs is the key thing. The Semantic Web and Linked Data connect because when we've got this web of linked data, there are already lots of technologies which exist to do fancy things with it. But it's time now to concentrate on getting the web of linked data out there. Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus How Linked Data Has Evolved via Grassroots RWW: Linked Data has had a lot of grassroots support, which you mentioned in your TED speech. This is something Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF, have struggled to get over the years. Has the W3C been pushing the more bottom-up Linked Data world, because of the frustration over lack of take-up of top-down Semantic Web ? TBL: A lot of the initial RDF and OWL projects came out of the academic world; and some of them were projects to show what you could do in a closed world. And the files were zipped up and left on a disc. While they were interesting projects, and while the systems were useful systems, the Semantic Web community maybe missed the point of the 'web' bit and focused too much on the 'semantic'. However the work that's been done in the Semantic Web, the standards, was really valuable. It's relatively recently for example that SPARQL [an RDF query language] has been developed. "It's time now to concentrate on getting the web of linked data out there." Somebody drew an analogy the other day: can you imagine trying to promote a world of databases without SQL? Even though it's not an interoperable protocol, it's just a query language. So similarly, all that's been put into RDF, rdfs and OWL is very valuable to the linked data community. The Linked Data community tend to use a subset of that [Semantic Web technologies], of OWL for example. But they certainly use SPARQL. So you could argue that really it wasn't ready to be deployed widely. Linked Data started as a very informal Design Issues note that I put in; it was a grassroots movement from very early on. So yes W3C has been emphasizing the importance of Linked Data. It's been the Semantic Web Interest Group of course, and various [other Semantic Web] activities, which has been pushing it. But also Linked Data has been seized on - a group of people for example put together DBpedia . 3 That wasn't commissioned, that was that they just thought it would be a really cool idea. Graph of Linked Data sets on the Web, as at March 2009 Linked Data and Governments RWW: In a recent Design Issues note , you urge governments to put their data online as Linked Data (although you'd also be happy for governments to just make available the raw data - presumably so that others can then structure it). What do you realistically expect, for example, the U.S. or U.K. governments to do over the next year? And in the near future, do you foresee different governments interconnecting their Linked Data sets? TBL: One can't generalize, governments are (like most big organizations) fascinatingly diverse inside them. So you'll find that there are places inside governments where you get a champion who gets linked data and who's just written a script and produced some linked data. So in the UK government for example, you'll find there's RDFa [in the code of its website] for civil service jobs. So if somebody wants to make a database of all the jobs, they can do that very easily. "The first step of actually putting the data out there is the one that nobody else can do." There are other cases where the easiest thing for somebody to do is to just put data up in whatever form it's available. Comma separated values (CSV) files are remarkably popular. They're exported sometimes from spreadsheets. It's remarkable how much information is in spreadsheets. Or sometimes pulled out of a database and then put up on the web. It's not as good, not as useful to the community, as if Linked Data had been put up there and linked. But the first step of actually putting the data out there is the one that nobody else can do. Data.gov , a catalog of public data, was launched in May by the U.S. government The way to go is for government departments to go the extra step and convert [their data] into Linked Data. One of the nice things about Linked Data, when they have a pile of it, is that they could run a SPARQL server on it. SPARQL servers are a commodity product, a solution for all of the people who say 'but actually I wanted to have XML.' A SPARQL server will generate an XML file [and] allow somebody to write out, effectively, a URL for the XML file. "Linked Data is the backplane, it's the thing that you connect to in both directions." In fact, I don't see why SPARQL servers shouldn't provide CSV files, something which as far as I know isn't in the standards. But I'd recommend it, certainly in government context, because CSV files are what people have and what people want. So the message [for government] is to use RDF. Linked Data is the backplane , it's the thing that you connect to in both directions. As a [web] producer your job is to make sure that you produce Linked Data one way or another. And as a consumer, there are lots of ways to consume that data once it's out there as Linked Data. In Part 2 of this interview we discussed: how previously reticent search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to participate in the Semantic Web in 2009, user interfaces for browsing and using data, what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of new computational engine Wolfram Alpha, how e-commerce vendors are moving into the Linked Data world, and finally how the Internet of Things intersects with the Semantic Web. Read Part 2 here . Footnotes: 1. The very first sentence written on this blog , on 20 April, 2003, was: "The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfill the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it." 2. For more on read/write browsers, you can read another early RWW post entitled What became of the Browser/Editor . 3. DBpedia is a community project to extract structured information from Wikipedia; see ReadWriteWeb's profile of this and similar resources. Discuss

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ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee, Part 1: Linked Data

Taptu , a mobile search engine that specializes in indexing mobile-friendly websites, just launched a new version of its iPhone app. The new app now includes real-time search results, which are powered by OneRiot . In addition to including these real-time search results, Taptu also worked hard on improving the speed of the app and on providing more relevant search results. Taptu offers apps for the iPhone, iPod touch ( iTunes link ) and Android, as well as a mobile optimized website. Sponsor Taptu first integrated real-time search results from OneRiot in its mobile web interface and in its Android app last month . The mobile apps definitely provide a far superior way of using the service than the mobile site, however. There are two ways to access real-time search results in the app. The homepage now displays the hottest trending topics and a single click on one of these opens up OneRiot search results. In addition, you can also do a normal search and then select 'latest buzz' from the options menu right next to the search box. This same menu also allows you to restrict search to images, videos, blog or Wikipedia articles, as well as to sites and blogs about sports, news or apps. For a closer look at Taptu's feature set, also have a look at our review of the service's web app . Discuss

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Taptu Adds Real-Time Search to Its Mobile Apps

Editor: This is a guest post by Andria Krewson , a freelance journalist who has written for Demand Media. Given our recent focus on Demand Media and so-called content farms , we thought it would be interesting to get a perspective from a Demand Media writer. I made $37.50 at Demand Studios in November. That money went directly into my Paypal account, on time, with no billing hassles. But it probably took me about six hours of filling out a profile, studying a style guide and learning how to navigate the system. So my hourly pay was about $6, for a writer new to the system. Sponsor Andria Krewson is a freelance journalist and consultant in Charlotte, N.C. She has worked at newspapers for 27 years, focusing on design and editing of community publications. She blogs for her neighborhood at Under Oak and covers changing culture at Crossroads Charlotte . Reach her on Twitter as @underoak . I had heard about Demand Studios from former co-workers before Wired wrote about Demand Media (Demand Studio's parent company) in October, and media pundits like Jay Rosen followed up with comments on Twitter and an interview with the company's CEO at ReadWriteWeb . [Ed: ReadWriteWeb's first analysis of Demand Media was in August.] Demand Media has been criticized for producing low-quality content designed for search engine optimization. It's not journalism, critics say, and it's clogging up Google searches, making good stuff hard to find. But I suspect much of that criticism has come from people who haven't gone inside the Demand Studios part of Demand Media to see how it really works, or they haven't thought enough about what kind of content it provides, or they haven't thought enough about how it feels to swallow your pride and make a little money with your strongest knowledge and skills, no matter the global hourly rate. There are differences between the user-generated content at sites Demand Media feeds, and the content generated by Demand Studios. So let's get to it. How it works People sign up as writers, editors or filmmakers. I signed up as a writer. Contributors study the style guide, which gives specifics on allowed citations, and why citations are needed, and how to write for search-engine optimization without sounding too clunky. New writers can also consult forums and connect with other contributors with social-networking tools. Writers can then use keywords, pay rates and general content areas to search through available assignments. Generally, enough assignments exist that writers can find subjects of personal interest. Fact sheets get $7.50 an assignment. I fulfilled one of those before I realized that rate of pay wasn't worth the effort. The next two assignments, for $15 each, both dealt with the same topic, with slightly different angles, and I chose them because I knew the subject well. Still, I had to do some research, to back up my statements and provide links to .edu or .gov sites. No Wikipedia allowed. Once accepting assignments, I had a week to submit them to editors. While I could have written each piece without any research, citations and outbound links are required, as well as a summary (a nut graf, essentially, in newspaper terms). Frankly, the discipline of filling out boxes with words could help some professional writers improve the focus of their pieces. Certainly new writers can learn from the system. And the SEO tips in the style guide are worth study. One piece I wrote was bounced back for further editing. The editor's comments were gentle but clear. I made fixes, resubmitted, and got paid, through Paypal, no invoices necessary. What's the content? The stories are usually how-to pieces, often broken into steps. They're evergreen, designed to be as relevant in a year or two as they are now. They're the kinds of questions I would usually get answered through a phone call to my contractor father, or my brother the car genius, or my mother the seamstress/cook/homemaker/gardener/early computer geek. You can tell by the assignment headlines that they're generated from search engine queries, and sometimes those search terms provide some amusement. People are actually turning to Google to ask these questions? What happened to asking basic questions from friends and family? But indeed, we're in a different world, and the criticism of Demand Media by some pundits strikes me as a bit elitist, as if the Internet weren't for everyone. A personal example: (Daughter, 19, volunteers to help me with my eye shadow for a special event.) Me: Where'd you learn this technique? Her: Youtube. (And indeed, eHow videos, supplied by Demand Media, show how to apply eye shadow.) Next page: Swallowing my pride Swallowing my pride My friends who first told me about Demand Studios are wordsmiths, copy editors of the highest skill levels, who worked for Demand Studios for $3.50 a story. Yes, $3.50 a story . But one friend, once he had the hang of the system, managed to work fast enough to raise his rate to about $20 an hour, from his couch, on his schedule, while waiting to get a full-time job elsewhere. Another friend also edited for Demand Studios, as a supplement to a part-time job before eventually getting full-time work, after about a year of underemployment. Demand Media doesn't need help with public relations from me. They're compiling comments in an internal forum from their writers about why they love Demand Studios. And plenty of people have commented. They appear to be overwhelmingly women, often with children, often English majors or journalism students, looking for a way to do what they love and make a little money at it. Compare those demographics to Wikipedia: more than 80% male, more than 65% single, more than 85% without children, around 70% under the age of 30. Admittedly, working for Demand Studios isn't a point of pride for most professional journalists. But the interface and the editing allow people with other expertise to share knowledge. I recommended the site to my father the contractor. It could be a good way for a retiree with a lifetime of knowledge to document life lessons for others. People with disabilities, or people who have to fit their work around children's schedules, or people between jobs have a place to earn some money, from their living rooms. It's not the only "writer mill" out there, but it has been under fire lately, and a look inside might add a little light. Jay Rosen's interview with the CEO of Demand Media, Richard Rosenblatt, done via IM, included this quote from Rosenblatt: "What's more like a sweatshop: someone's living room working their own hours or a typical newsroom?" Certainly some people in newsrooms are feeling pressure these days, but perhaps that quote isn't quite fair. For a newsroom copy editor to earn $28 an hour (not factoring in benefits), at the Demand Studios rate of $3.50 a story , they would have to "edit" 64 stories in an eight-hour shift. I don't know of newsrooms that are quite at that point yet, but then again, we're in a global economy, with global pay rates. Some wordsmiths will choose to work from their couches. Take a good, broad look at what they produce before criticizing. Check out ReadWriteWeb's entire coverage of Demand Media and content farms: Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried How Google Can Combat Content Farms Jay Rosen Interviews Demand Media: Are Content Farms "Demonic"? Demand Media Is a Page View Generating Machine - And it's Working Answers.com: 31 Million Copied and Pasted Web Pages Can't Go Wrong The Age of Mega Content Sites - Answers.com and Demand Media How Demand Media Produces 4,000 Pieces of Content a Day Ad-Driven Content - Is it Crossing The Line? Discuss

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What It's Like To Write For Demand Media: Low Pay But Lots of Freedom

The Google Chrome team released a beta version of its Mac browser this morning and opened up an official gallery of browser extensions . That's exciting news because the addition of more than 300 extensions, combined with blazing speed and good stability, makes Chrome the best browser on the market today. We got a chance to talk with Nick Baum, Product Manager and Brian Rakowski, Director of Product Management at Google Chrome this afternoon and they shared a number of interesting tidbits with us about the nature and future of extensions in Chrome. Sponsor Chrome was released more than a year ago and users have been clamoring for extensions ever since. Rakowski and Baum said that a request for extensions was bug #18 filed in the browser's bug tracking system - it's something that Firefox has conditioned users to expect. Now those extensions are here and it's a very interesting story. Understanding the Versions of Chrome Between Chrome, Chromium, dev and beta releases, things are getting a little complicated. Here's how it breaks down: Chromium is open source developer channel, "the bleeding edge" of Chrome development. That's what we've been using here on Mac and it's the only Mac version today that supports extensions. It's untested and less stable than the other versions. We've been using it for months, though, with only occasional problems. Chrome is the official release. There are 3 versions of Chrome: dev , beta ( Windows or Mac ) and stable (Windows only). The vast majority of users use the stable version, Mac users got beta build 4.0 today. Dev builds come out every week or so and are at most 1 week behind Chromium. Baum and Rakowski asked in our interview for us to please switch to using the Dev version for Mac instead of Chromium as soon as it supports extensions. Mac Dev Version Will Get Extension Support Very Soon Some of Nick Baum's Favorite Chrome Extensions So Far Aviary - screen capture and image editing Google Docs PDF/PPT Viewer Google Translate - truly, a wonder to behold Brizzly - an advanced Twitter experience, built by Baum's former co-worker on Google Reader, Jason Shellen Right now the official extension gallery won't allow Mac users to download extensions. Officially, at least. This bookmarklet will allow you to install them in Chromium on a Mac with just one extra click. (Thanks, MG Seigler , for finding that.) That bookmarklet will not allow you to use extensions in the official beta for Mac that launched today, just in Chromium. Baum and Rakowski told us today that the next dev build for Mac will allow extensions. That could be out as early as tomorrow morning or in a few days, and it's anyone's guess when extension support will come to the Beta version released today. (Who wants to use the Beta version when Dev is so much cooler?) Anyone can get extensions from an unofficial site called ChromeExtensions.org and if you're on a Mac it's probably most effective tonight to grab Chromium and the bookmarklet above. Then you can get extensions from the official site as well. Chrome Extensions Are Not Like Firefox Extensions Unlike Firefox extensions, Chrome extensions install without a browser restart and they update automatically. Too many extensions have been a part of the bloat that's made Firefox-use nearly intolerable for many of us, but the Chrome team says extensions will cause no more drag on Chrome performance than opening up a new web page in another tab would. That's a big part of the premise of Chrome, that every process is running distinct from other processes, so one tab can't slow or crash the others. It's an architecture well suited to running web applications, not just loading web pages, and it's great to hear that the extensions platform works the same way. GreaseMonkey? Oh, There Will Be GreaseMonkey One of the most enjoyable tide pools of innovation in the Firefox extension world is built on top of the Javascript user script plug-in GreaseMonkey . These tiny scripts re-organize web pages in radical ways for more usefulness and fun. Scripts like AutoPagerize will load the next page at the bottom of the one you're on, creating a continuous scroll, or WikiDashboard will insert a drop-down dashboard into every Wikipedia page to show a scatter plot graph of who has edited that page the most. The fun never stops with GreaseMonkey. What of Chrome, though? Guess where, Aaron Boodman , the creator of GreaseMonkey works now? That's right, on the Chrome Extensions team. Boodman recently made it even easier for GreaseMonkey scripts to be added to Chrome than they are in Firefox. A single click transforms the scripts into Chrome Extensions, at least for Windows users. We haven't found a successful Mac implementation yet, but we've got our fingers crossed that this will no longer be an issue when full extension support comes to Chrome for Mac. Red Hot APIs On the Way Baum told us today that the team "will add APIs for other data types soon, personal web history being a prime candidate, so extensions will be able to access that and manipulate it in all sorts of ways." That sounds great. It's one thing for a browser to promise not to sell my web history, but it's a whole new ball game when developers can build software that lets me derive all the more value from the history of my activity around the web. Bring it on, Team Chrome! We might feel a little guilty for abandoning the wonderful community project that is Firefox, but this new browser is just so damn good it's hard not to give it a serious try. It just so turns out, we have a particularly relevant sponsor this month that we should point to. Add-on-Con is a major event all about browser add-ons. It's being held in Mountain View, CA this Friday. Google is a sponsor and Aaron Boodman, the man behind GreaseMonkey and now working on Chrome Extensions, is a speaker. Check it out! Discuss

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5 Cool Things to Know About Google Chrome Extensions