Up Next, More Browser Tools for WebCenter Sharing

On the heels of our bookmarklet for sharing to WebCenter, today we were designing another other way to help people interact with WebCenter from the browser without interrupting their workflow.

We’re building browser extensions, first for Firefox, then for Chrome and possibly the newly released Safari 5.

If you read here, you’ll know we’re an agile team, so the plan is to build and release iteratively. This will also help us build just enough to meet demand and no more, i.e. if we build an extension and no one uses it, at least we didn’t invest too much time and effort.

First, we’ll build a publisher with file upload capabilities, similar to the one we added to WebCenter Spaces.

We plan to do some cool stuff, like add an HTML5 dropzone for files (a la GMail), capture highlighted text in the publisher (like Delicious does), add a contextual menu item for sharing to WebCenter.

All pretty simple stuff, the goal being to facilitate quick sharing without disrupting the user’s natural workflow.

We kicked around the idea of consolidating other networks, like Connect and OraTweet, into the publisher, and adding an option to share by email as well. I like these for convenience, but they’ll open up a can of worms we might not want to deal with when people start asking for thread aggregation. We’ll see.

Later versions of the extensions will probably include a stream view with filtering and possibly Growl-style notifications for activity. Again, we’ll see what users want, if anything.

Here’s a shot of the all-important whiteboard, where the guys sketched out a design. I know, says a lot, almost as good as a prototype.

If you read here, you’ll know we’ve always been light on work content, but we like to let you all know what we’re doing.

As Rich and Anthony work on development of the Firefox and Chrome extensions in the coming weeks, maybe they’ll feel the urge to share with you.

When the extension is complete, I’ll blog it, and maybe we’ll have some code to share.

Thoughts? Find the comments.