FriendFeed Greasemonkey Scripts Round Two. Smaller Tabs, More Choices

The response to yesterdays release of a range of greasemonkey scripts to add tabs to FriendFeed has been great. Not everyone gets the appeal, and I fully get that (it’s not for everyone), but others do, and already it has delivered for me personally what I set out for it to do: make certain pages more easily accessible.

ReadBurner was the first script I wrote, and there was a reason for this: I love the service, but it’s not yet mission critical for me so it wasn’t on my always open tab list. By having it in FriendFeed I probably visited the page 10x more today than I have in previous days. Plurk was the second script, and the problem was the same: yet another tab in Firefox. I like Plurk, but it’s not mission critical yet, but having it in FriendFeed makes it convenient. Not surprisingly the Google Reader script has been the most popular, combining feed reading into a tool like FriendFeed makes a lot of sense.

For the new release, first a change. Space is an issue with tabs and until I find a way of cascading tabs so they don’t interfere with existing tabs. Until this time there is always going to be a limit on the amount of tabs people can have running. With space at a premium the logical way to save on space is to cut the text labels from the tabs and replace them with favicons. All existing scripts have now been updated and only display favicons. In theory most users will be prompted to update the scripts installed, if you want to keep the text tabs, don’t update them, if you want better space management update them. If you’re not prompted for an update the full list of scripts is below and they can be easily reinstalled.

The second announcement is a range of new scripts, particularly given that the extra space means you can fit more in. Each link is to the Userscripts page where you can install from there.

Services:iGoogle, Bloglines, Gmail, Disqus.

Social Voting:Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Mixx.

Sites:TechCrunch, CrunchGear, LifeHacker, Problogger, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, ParisLemon, LouisGray, WinExtra, SheGeeks, The Inquisitr, Scoble, AllThingsD, Norg Media.

The original, and now updated scripts
ReadBurner, Plurk, Twitter, Google Reader, Netvibes, Facebook, Techmeme

Future
Ideally these will one day become one script and user definable, however I’m not a js expert and I’m still working my way through coding these things, however it is on the list for a future release…just don’t expect it tomorrow, or even next week. If someone else can code a multi-tab, easily user definable script that implements what these do individually, be my guest, and ping me when you’re finished and I’ll give it a plug.