Vysr Packs Let You RoamAbout The User-Centric Web
June 4th, 2008 (10:00am) Scott Blitstein 3 CommentsTweet This
The folks at Vysr announced today the release of Business and Social Packs for their RoamAbout Platform. RoamAbout provides contextual access to your favorite web services and social networks without leaving your source site, and these targeted collections significantly extend their offering.
The Business Pack is aimed for productivity with hooks for news and finance along with Wikipedia, while the Social Pack brings Flickr, YouTube and Twitter on board. The Web Worker will likely need both, and the extension does allow you to customize the interface to choose the desired services.
Using the RoamAbout extension couldn’t be easier. Just select your desired search or action content on any web site and then choose the desired button from the unobtrusive toolbar. A window appears with your contextual content allowing you really convenient access to your other services, all without leaving your source site.
It’s very cool technology and these two Productivity Packs are great examples of what can be done with the open RoamAbout platform. As developers come aboard and extend it further, I can see it becoming exponentially more useful. I’m already compiling a wish list of sites I’d like to see added.
Some of this sort of functionality is available in standalone Firefox extensions but I like the idea of a single app that pulls it all together. It’s lightweight and the integrated toolbar is really handy.
The RoamAbout extension is available for free download for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Tags: firefox, user-centric, vysr
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Downloaded and used this software a couple of weeks then had to remove it because it kept kicking up script error messages for each tab opened in Internet Explorer 7. Far as I’m concerned, it’s not ready for prime time yet. I’ll try it again when the next version releases because it would be great if they fix it.