Chime is a Chrome extension that keeps you notified about your major social networks and web services. This free beta version of Chime will provide alerts about activity on Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and many more. Chime generates a list of all these services and links directly to individual posts. With Chime you will be able to stay connected without tabbing between multiple sites.
Features
The beta release of Chime has support for ten web services: Google+, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Flickr, GitHub, Foursquare, Reddit, and Stackoverflow. For Chime to recognize a service you must log into each of them separately from their main website. Once you’ve logged in to one or more of these services Chime will notify you of activity in three ways. First, a pop-up will show in the lower right corner of your desktop. Second, clicking the Chime extension icon will show a drop down list of all unread alerts. Last, you can open a Chime tab that will provide all past notifications.
With all of these great features it's a shame that Chime does not support other popular web services such as LinkedIn, Tumblr, or Outlook. Hopefully these will be included in the final release.
Usability
Chime is intuitive and easy to use. You will be presented with large icons of each of the supported web services, though there are no rollovers or headers for ones you might not be familiar with. Clicking on an icon will take you to the corresponding website where you can log in. Chime's functionality depends on your settings on each individual website. For example, if you disable notifications on Facebook, then Chime will have nothing to intercept. Clicking on a notification will take you directly to the corresponding website.
Despite Chime’s name there are no actual audio notifications or settings to change how notifications appear. At present you can only choose to enable/disable desktop notifications. You can filter and hide each service type in both the drop down menu and Chime tab. However, if you do not have log in cookies enabled filtering will log you out of a service.
Quality
Chime is coordinated with each network’s prime color: Facebook is blue, Reddit is orange, etc. Whenever a notification pops up or is checked it will have a clear colored banner. Chime has slow down when first logging into a service, especially if it’s accumulating hundreds of unread emails or replies. After the initial hiccup Chime works smoothly without noticeable performance issues.
Conclusion
Chime is a great way to stay on top of ten popular web services and social networks. The beta might have some minor performance and functionality issues, but it’s still an excellent means of monitoring popular sites.
Download Chime 1.78 in
