The Huffington Post And Google Chrome Caught Making Out Together

Last night while indulging my web content addiction, I arrived, unsurprisingly, at The Huffington Post. The first thing that caught my eye was the prompt at the top of the page to install the Huff Po’s very own Google Chrome Extension which promised to give me “up to the minute reports, blogs and analysis with quick-view articles from all sections.”

I quickly did a screen grab and began searching to see if anyone had written about this yet. The only post I found was on SEO and Tech Daily from three days ago, which perplexed me as I see this as a fantastic way to stay in front of a readers eyeballs and another example of The Huffington Post’s ability to embrace new tools to increase reader engagement.

Why This Is A Great Idea

Although The Huffington Post already capitalizes on Facebook, Twitter and even LinkedIn integration, Huff Po’s updates on those services have a good chance of being lost in the noise of the real-time stream. With a Google Chrome extension however, The Huffington Post is always there, ever present in your browser, regardless of what website you happen to be perusing at the moment.

The extension, in effect, puts a mini Huffington Post blog in your browser at all times. Alerting you when there are new posts and showing you the latest post in every category as you browse inside the extension. If you use other updating extensions like I do for Gmail and Google Reader, your eye is already accustomed to checking the top right corner, putting The Huffington Post front and center of some very valuable screen real estate.

Also it makes sense to target Chrome with it’s well over 40 million users and 7% and growing market share, whose tech-geek-early-adopting users are probably more likely to get their latest news and share it on the web.

With over 22,000 installations at the time of this writing I wouldn’t be shocked to see other big Internet blogs follow suit. I think they’d be foolish not to. In fact, I’ve been attempting to find similar Chrome extension use cases and mulling over some new ways to take advantage of Chrome extensions for myself.

Let me know what you think. Have you seen any other sites using Chrome extensions so creatively? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.  UPDATE: Thanks to splashgr in the comments below I was able to dig a little deeper and found that both Mashable.com and Tarot.com have had official Google Chrome extensions since May.

Tags: chrome extensions, Google, huffington post