Hacker News Reader

Comment by bemmu | Hacker News Reader

MetaExtension is my current project.

I started this project after noticing how little usage most Chrome extensions get, even though many of them are quite useful. Most decent Chrome extensions have just some thousands of users, even though there are around 100 million Chrome users.

The idea is to have a directory of apps that go well with certain websites, exposed through a Chrome extension that then informs users if any apps are available for the website they are currently visiting.

It seems this would benefit both users and the app developers.

View on HN

Is this manually curated, or are you querying extension permissions from the app store?

I've got an extension that combines the collapsible threads with the ability to highlight new comments. However, I never did put it in the chrome extension directory. It's available here: http://hckrnews.com/about.html

I use wvl's extension (hckr news), and it's awesome, especially the "new comments highlighting" feature.

Manually curating now, I look at a list where new submissions arrive and click accept / deny after checking that the submission seems to work and isn't of lower quality than some submission from before. I think having several apps that do exactly the same thing isn't very beneficial.

I think having several apps that do the same thing is very beneficial. Competition from competitors is probably the biggest reason why apps improve.

My challenge now is to grow the userbase of MetaExtension itself, otherwise this would become one of those forgotten apps and fail to fulfill its promise. Besides just throwing the app out there on the Chrome store and hoping for installs, I'm also trying to create linkbait-type pages targeted to certain websites. I did one for Digg and HN now as first tests. Digg was total failure, not one person besides myself even clicked the link.

I've missed similar functionality since I switched from Chrome to Firefox (although for Firefox it was actually looking up user-scripts, which I guess is largely the same as Chrome extensions).

Good job. Checking it out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com