I’ve been using the Firefox sidebar for a few things recently and found it quite usable. Last week my team started using Campfire and it works really well. And then Twitter started becoming more useful to me thanks to SwitchABit.
All in all I ended up with too many separate tabs/windows to monitor easily.
I then rembered that Fluid (the SSB I use for Campfire) supports the BrowsaBrowsa sidebar like plugins. This lets me display two extra websites (Twitter and Google Reader) on either side of the main website (Campfire.) Twitter and Google Reader fit nicely into the narrow sidebars and Campfire fits nicely into the middle area. One problem with Fluid and Google Reader though is that I can’t use the keyboard shortcuts as they are directed at the central pane.
So now I have one window I can alt-tab to and quickly get an overview of my RSS feeds, internal project chat and my Twitter messages.
