idio Platform

Late in December, we were approached by the Google Chrome team to be an beta partner responsible for building some exciting Chrome Extensions for their Chrome 4.0 launch. So we reached out to a few people, played around with some ideas, and last week, put a few Extensions live. And we are seeing some superb early metrics…

What do they do?
They are buttons that sit in your Chrome browser, and display a count of the unread stories from a site you love. When you click on the button, it displays the headlines and article abstracts, allowing you to click through to read. You can customize the extension by selecting only the topics or feeds you want to be notified about. Basically it enables you keep right up to date, without having to keep going back to a browser window.

There is also a search bar, so you can search the site right from your browser, and you would expect, buttons to share any content you like via Twitter, Facebook, or Digg.

Who are our partners?
Our first newspaper partner is The Independent. We built this extension using their well defined topic feeds, and it is currently being used by a small test audience before promotion later this month.

We also released an extension with E!Online, a celeb-focused Comcast property. To follow this, we will be releasing extensions for a few more popular Comcast properties.

As a bit of fun, we launched an extension for ReadWriteWeb, one of our favourite tech news blogs. They showed their story-finding chops by discovering it within a day, and writing a nice article on it (read it here).

We have several more in the works, for equally high profile publishers. If you are interesting in having one, please just drop us an email.

What are the benefits?
Well to the user, the benefits are obvious. You have all the functionality (customized alerts, search, share) all built into the one application which you are bound to have open all day.

The publisher also wins! Because the alerts drive attention (just like an unread count on your emails), the amount of times a person clicks to view the latest stories, and the amount of times they click through to view an article, are MUCH higher than with normal browsing. We will hopefully share some stats soon, but lets just say that these extensions are pretty addictive!

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