Web giant Google has developed a way for people in the same room to share web links by making their laptop emit a special tone.
How this works is that a button is placed to the right of Google Chrome’s URL bar, which when clicked emits a tone to share a link to the page which is currently loaded.
Anyone who is sitting nearby will receive an on-screen notification with your Google profile name and picture, plus the link you’ve shared.
When clicked, the link opens in a new Chrome tab. However, it can be ignored.
“Sometimes in the course of exploring new ideas, we’ll stumble upon a technology application that gets us excited. Google said in a blog post.
“Tone is a perfect example: it’s a Chrome extension that broadcasts the URL of the current tab to any machine within earshot that also has the extension installed. Tone is an experiment that we’ve enjoyed and found useful, and we think you may as well.
“The first version of Tone was built in an afternoon for fun, but we increasingly found ourselves using it to share documents with everyone in a meeting quickly, to exchange design files back and forth while collaborating on user interface design, and to contribute relevant links without interrupting conversations.”
It added that most problems encountered with the service can be solved by simply turning up the volume of the alert tone.
“Not every nearby machine will always receive every broadcast, just like not everyone will always hear every word someone says. But resending is painless and debugging generally just requires raising the volume.”
At the moment, the plug-in works only with the desktop version of Google’s Chrome browser and keeps your microphone turned on when activated.
Via SKY
