Your online social life in a browser sidebar

Yoono is a Firefox add-on that allows you to bring together your social networks and chat programs, and adds rich media to whatever you’re viewing on the net. If you want live updates from Facebook or MySpace while you browse elsewhere, this could be for you.

Yoono sits in a collapsible sidebar in Firefox. You can sign into Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, AIM, and Yahoo Messenger.

Yoono will send little pop up alerts every time you have an update or message. You can decide what you get alerts for, and whether you want audio notification too. Yoono now supports multiple columns, like a desktop application.

As well as social networking, Yoono will also sync with your Google reader account, and you can listen to internet radio from Last.fm. Unfortunately, you can’t currently sign in to Last.fm, or listen to user radio stations.

Yoono is customizable in terms of functions, you can add or remove any of the services mentioned, choose the size of the side bar and one of seven color schemes. There could have been more skins, but Yoono collects together social network sites very well. The chat programs are OK but not perfect – the people you chat with in Windows Live Messenger won’t know when you’re typing, for example.

Hit the search icon, and you can get automatic content related to whatever you’re viewing in the current tab. This can be related searches, videos, products or Wikipedia entries.

Yoono is ideal for people who want to be constantly connected and up to date with their social world.