Okay Geek Farm
Parrotfish is a Dynamic Twitter sidebar for Chrome Users
Connor Scalleat
Ever since the new Twitter was launched, I have found myself using their website a lot more. Twitter really out-did themselves in this relaunch, and has really made me change the way I use Twitter. Their sidebar feature is absolutely epic, but it is obviously missing a lot of features, but Twitter really did a good job embedding lots of small bits of the media from the links and services that are contained in Tweets, but they never really pushed it to it’s full capacity. Finally something is their to full-fill all those missing features!
The solution is a plug-in called Parrotfish. The plug-in is available for download for all Chrome users and other Chrome based browsers, such as Rockmelt! This plug-in allows you to access the embedded form of hundreds of services, just like you can with photos and videos. On the right there is an example of this service displaying a Foursquare check-in.
Parrotfish can offer a much more dynamic experience, and not just for articles and videos — other web apps too! Revision3, Vimeo, Dribbble, Skitch, Last.fm, Posterous and Tumblr are all fully supported like you see on the side, but the entire list of services is too big to list here — for a full list of providers hit up this page.
Some users might already be familiar with this service because apps like Tweet-deck and Tweetie (among other applications) use embed.ly’s API to put images, videos and other media directly in their feeds. Parrotfish makes such an improvement to Twitter’s web app as a whole, and it really gets you excited to use it again. With the ability to essentially access any article / video / photo / etc right from a social feed is absolutely astounding — Grab the addon here!
