August 28, 2007 By Rafe Needleman, WebWare

Conduit improves its toolbar

Conduit makes a slick utility for creating browser toolbars. I covered the product back in April, and I had one main beef: Each toolbar you installed took up additional real estate in a browser. Conduit has just fixed that. The company has added some other new features as well.

With today's release, when Conduit users add toolbars after the first one they have, each becomes an option on a dropdown item within the toolbar. Conduit is also releasing multi-toolbar packs with pre-loaded combinations of toolbars. There's a "Blogs" pack (Webware is included in it) as well as Music, Sports, Games, and Video.

I also like the notification Conduit users get when they surf to a site that has a toolbar they haven't yet installed. It's like the little RSS icon that lights up in some browsers when you go to a page with a feed. It makes it very easy to add sites to your Conduit lineup.

Conduit is, in a sense, a one-line-high single-page aggregator. You can add a lot of sites and feeds to your Conduit lineup, just like you can with an SPA, and quickly jump between them.

Developers can also write little widgets for toolbars. For example, the Lufthansa toolbar lets you look up flight data.

To get the wide view of what's important to me, I still prefer visiting a single-page aggregator like Netvibes. But Conduit is worth a look. It makes accessing your favorite sites very easy, and it adds utility to them as well.

Conduit chief marketing officer Reena Jadhav explains the new features in the video at right.

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