PalRelay is a great new way to keep up with what’s going on in the most popular social media sites on the web, specifically tailored to the content you are currently browsing. It sits in the bottom of your browser as an unobtrusive little bar, silent and grey until it finds something relevant to tell you.
PalRelay costs absolutely nothing, is compatible with many of the most popular social media sites out there, and doesn’t record your browsing sessions or otherwise violate your privacy.
For every web page you view, there are likely a dozen more out there on various social media sites that could have relating information. For example, if you are viewing a page about homelessness in the U.S. on a news page, there could also be similar stories or links on another page. To get more specific, social media sites like Facebook are often relatable to whatever you happen to be viewing because no matter what you’re looking at on the web the odds are high that someone else has something to say about the subject and has probably done so on a social media site.
That’s where PalRelay comes in. Normally, if you wanted to discover, say, what your Facebook friends think about zombies, you would have to go to their pages and do a search for zombies, then find the relevant posts and go through them. PalRelay does all of this automatically for you without even a single button press. The bar and the icons will be grey and partly transparent until one of the sites you have activated on the bar finds something relevant about what you are currently viewing, at which point the icon for that site will go solid and light up, so to speak, letting you know there’s something there to see.
PalRelay also has a handy function to run Notepad as a mini application right from the PalRelay bar at the bottom of your browser so you can record notes on anything you happen to find that is of interest and it works just as the version you might run from your Start button. PalRelay is compatible currently with Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Digg, Delicious, and there are many plans for further sites to be supported. PalRelay is currently In late Beta stages, which means it works pretty well but there is still room for improvement before they release it as a final version. It also means that sometimes it can have some unexpected results, like giving you pages that may not 100% be accurate as far as the subject you’re currently browsing on but overall I found it to be pretty good at reading my intentions and finding posts or other relevant content in my social networks. It’s a great way to keep up on what your friends are thinking as well as getting a feel for the general pulse of the Internet’s gestalt mind on any given subject, and since it costs nothing at all, you can’t lose! It’s also noteworthy that PalRelay does not record any of your demographic or browsing information or history, either. The information it picks up is quick in and out of the application so that you don’t have to worry about anyone or anything keeping tabs on what you’re looking at, if that’s a concern for you.
Overall, I found PalRelay to be a great addition to my freeware library and I am very anxious to see the improvements and new features and connected sites that may be added in the future. In the meantime, I intend to use it extensively and offer plenty of feedback to the developers so they have the right information to make it even better in the future. Until next time, my friends.
- Get PalRelay Beta here.
