There have been attempts on making a social browser in the past as well and currently a second wave of making a social browser is in full progress. Flock, Rockmelt and Mozilla are trying to outdo each other in making a successful Social Browser. All this is an effort to build a browser that integrates well with our social lifestyle on web. Flock and Rockmelt are trying to make a Social browser that has Chrome at their base.
This may well point us to think that why not make an extension to Chrome for making it social rather than reinventing a whole browser. This is exactly what this extension named Cortex does. It adds a thin layer over your browser when you click and keep holding your right mouse button , giving you the option to share on Instapaper , Twitter , Facebook and Tumbler. Only these four services are supported in Cortex Chrome Extension. And it is extremely simple to use.
The sharing mechanism is a wheel which appears after you click and keep holding your mouse button. If you hover over one of these four areas , an option to share a message also appears which then is shared as your twitter post or a post on your Facebook Wall. It also gives you the option to share directly with your pre selected friends using its setup. At writing of this post it has 13, 866 active users with 16,857 weekly installs. it has been developed by Eric Wold and Joey Primaiani who have worked at Google on designing touch interface for search for its tablet and mobile search market. It can be expected that such a simple extension will soon be available for mobile touch devices as well.
On thing that sets apart Cortex from other extensions is its speed and simple approach. Extension takes upon itself to choose the tile and image that it will be used for posting. It hardly takes between 2 to 3 seconds on average to share something. You can download Cortex here . Below is an introductory video about Cortex.
Thanks for the Cortex article
– Joey