The 30 best Safari extensions -- so far

Better social networking

Twitter for Safari

There are a plethora of Twitter-related extensions. The best, however, is the one from Twitter itself, which makes it easy to tweet about Web pages as you surf, view top trends and see who is talking about a site or article. It's handy for business users who want to keep tabs on what people are saying about their products, companies or Web sites.

The extension adds a toolbar with a Twitter search form, the top 10 trending topics on Twitter, and buttons to post new tweets or to see tweets related to whatever page you're currently looking at. Clicking "Tweet" opens your Twitter.com home page and, if you're logged in, creates a new tweet with the page title and shortened URL of whatever page you're looking at; otherwise it prompts you to log in. Clicking "Related Tweets" opens a sidebar listing the last 15 tweets that link to or mention the page you are on.

The Twitter for Safari extension makes it easy to see who's talking about any Web page you visit.

Shortenz Linkz

A number of extensions offer easy access to link-shortening services, but Shortenz Linkz from Trailing Zee Productions takes the cake: It supports the widest range of services, can be used to tweet links automatically and offers some support for customized link creation (such as for Flickr and YouTube as well as Bit.ly accounts). Shortenz Linkz isn't available in the Safari Extensions Gallery, but you can download it from the developer's site.

Facebook Cleaner

If you want your Facebook experience to be just about what's in your timeline or on your wall, SonsterMedia's Facebook Cleaner is the perfect plug-in for you. It blocks almost everything else, including ads, friend suggestions and references to things your friends like, as well application-specific items like pokes, from appearing in the Facebook sidebar. And it speeds up Facebook load times a bit.

Better Facebook

Facebook Cleaner is great if you're just interested in cleaning up Facebook's appearance, but if you want to go whole-hog with Facebook customization, give Better Facebook a whirl. The extension makes dozens of changes to your Facebook home page, such as separating status updates that originated on Facebook from posts imported from Twitter, adding your "Liked" pages to the main page, and adding buttons to mark read posts as "read" so you don't waste time re-reading them.

If you don't like any of these changes, you can easily change them back in the extension's myriad options, which also let you do everything from forcing Facebook to display the Most Recent feed instead of the edited News Feed to automatically loading older posts as you approach the bottom of the page and hiding old comments when you revisit a post to see new comments.

Better Facebook offers tons of options to make Facebook, well, better.

Another nice feature is the Privacy Scan, which uses the tool from ReclaimPrivacy.org to check your page for potential leaks of information to people other than your friends.

YourVersion

YourVersion combines the social bookmarking features of sites like Delicious with the broadcasting abilities of Twitter and Facebook and the serendipity of discovery sites like StumbleUpon.

YourVersion makes it easy to share content via Facebook, Twitter or e-mail.

Click the YourVersion button in your Safari toolbar and a window opens on your current page offering a shortened URL for that page. You can copy and paste it wherever you want or use the shortcuts to automatically create a Twitter post, Facebook update or e-mail message with the link embedded.

If you register for a free YourVersion account, the links you send will also be saved to your account. You can also simply bookmark pages for later reference. Entering a topic and clicking the "Discover" button opens a YourVersion page listing pages other users have shared or bookmarked that relate to your search terms. (An account is not necessary for bookmarking or Discover features.)

HoverZoom

Want to see a larger version of a Web site image when you hover your cursor over it? Side Tree Media's HoverZoom does just that at a range of sites, including Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Twitter. It works with a surprisingly large range of non-social-media sites as well and optionally offers zoomed-in previews of many Web video sources in addition to still images.