Category: Technology Author : Duncan Riley Posted: June 5, 2008
Tags : friendfeed, google reader, greasemonkey, netvibes

Turn FriendFeed Into Your Start Page With These Greasemonkey Scripts

When I wrote my FriendFeed wishlist May 29 my number one wish was for FriendFeed to support custom tabs. This isn’t happening yet, and even if it did it would likely be for content currently supported by FriendFeed, not external services. But I still wanted tabs, and inspired by a Greasemonkey script called FriendFeed tabs (they use the plural, but it only delivers Techmeme in a tab) I started hacking away at the code to see if there was a way of adding other services. There was.

Here’s the scripts I’ve created so far. Each script can be used with each other and has been tested on Firefox 3 on the Mac and Windows. Before installing any of them you’ll need to install Greasemonkey if you haven’t already (the latest beta for FF3 RC 1 can be downloaded here). The last proviso is that unfortunately the tabs don’t create a second row at the moment so if you install every one and don’t have your browser at a decent width they’ll end up blocking existing FriendFeed tabs. This wasn’t the case for me, but it can happen, at least until I code a work around for it.

FriendFeed ReadBurner (download)
Adds a ReadBurner tab to FriendFeed

FriendFeed Plurk (download)
Adds a Plurk tab to FriendFeed

FriendFeed Twitter (download)
Adds a Twitter tab to FriendFeed. Note, that this is the actual Twitter page so many wont need this nor want it. However if you’re like me and have had to block tweets from FriendFeed it’s a work around that allows you to switch into Twitter from within FriendFeed.

FriendFeed Google Reader (download)
Adds a Google Reader tab to FriendFeed, inspired by Louis Gray.

FriendFeed Netvibes (download)
Make FriendFeed your start page and have Netvibes as a tab within

FriendFeed Facebook (download)

FriendFeed Techmeme (download)
Note: although the original script these are based on displayed Techmeme, it isn’t compatible with these scripts due to the way it displays tabs, so a new Techmeme script is required.

I’ll probably create some more in the coming days, and am happy to take suggestions on additional scripts and even code improvements. Enjoy + screen shots as follows: