Blogging Tips

Now that the Google Chrome browser is soon to come out with their long-awaited extensions, it will be much easier to keep up with your Twitter account while using it. Right now there are currently two Twitter extensions that can be used if you’re on the Chrome Developer’s Channel; those two extensions are Kutano and Chromed Bird. I have personally tried both and they’re each great extensions that are easy to use. Chromed Bird is on the simple side while Kutano is more feature rich. So, which one you use will all depend on what you’re looking for.

Chromed Bird has two themes to choose from: Chromified and Whispers. Chromified is a white and baby blue theme while Whispers is a mainly yellow/orange theme. It has three columns – home, mentions and direct messages. You’re able to see the source of each tweet. So if someone is using Hootsuite, it will show that. For each tweet you can reply, retweet it or share it. I’m sure you’re wondering what the difference is between retweeting and sharing. Well, with retweeting you’re not able to edit or add anything to the tweet, it’s just automatically retweeted. With the share feature you can actually edit the tweet and add text to it.

You can also, of course post a tweet; there’s a URL shortener included. In the Chromed Bird options, you can choose which URL shortener to use when shrinking your links. Also in the options, you can choose how many tweets to show per page, maximum tweets to show, and specify refresh time intervals. Chromed Bird also includes auto pagination; once you get to the end of the tweets, more will automatically be displayed. That’s about it – it’s a pretty standard extension that gets the job done.

Kutano, on the other hand, does much more than just display the home feed, mentions and direct messages. There’s also a column to view followers and unfollowers. That’s right, if someone unfollows you you’ll be able to see it under this column along with the day that they unfollowed you. There’s also a column to view tweets pertaining to the particular page and website you’re on. Lastly you can view discussions about the particular page and website you’re on that have been directly posted via Kutano’s own messaging system.

When composing a tweet to send, it will automatically place a shortened link to the page you’re on in the tweet box. This makes it easy to tweet about any page that you’re viewing. There’s also two shortcut buttons on the side of the tweet box for your convenience. One button will automatically insert a shortened URL of the web page you’re currently viewing. The other button lets you easily tweet about the currently page you’re viewing by automatically inserting something like “Reading: Web page name http://shorturl.here“.

For each tweet in the timeline you can reply, retweet or send a direct message to that user. When retweeting, you are able to edit the tweet and add text before posting. Kutano also has auto pagination, so as you scroll down tweets will keep loading. In the settings area you can also specify how often you’d like the home column, mentions column, and direct mentions column to refresh.

Unfortunately, each extension only allows you to keep track of one Twitter account. Since I have two Twitter accounts, I’m using Chromed Bird for one and Kutano for the other. Which extension do you prefer?

Please note: At this time you will need to be using Chrome’s Developer’s Channel in order to use these extensions until they are officially released for the regular version of Chrome.