I’ve covered RoamAbout in the past and was impressed at the idea of being able to connect to my networking and other services from anywhere, all without leaving my source site.

Their existing Personal and Business Packs gave us a taste of what RoamAbout could do, but I can’t wait to see how things progress in the hands of the development community. I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on the application directory to see what we can come up with. The demand for access to the development site has apparently been overwhelming.

RoamAbout is a free extension available for IE and Firefox.

What services would you like to see added to RoamAbout?

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The Business Pack is aimed for productivity with hooks for news and finance along with Wikipedia, while the Social Pack brings Flickr, YouTube and Twitter on board. The Web Worker will likely need both, and the extension does allow you to customize the interface to choose the desired services.

Using the RoamAbout extension couldn’t be easier. Just select your desired search or action content on any web site and then choose the desired button from the unobtrusive toolbar. A window appears with your contextual content allowing you really convenient access to your other services, all without leaving your source site.

It’s very cool technology and these two Productivity Packs are great examples of what can be done with the open RoamAbout platform. As developers come aboard and extend it further, I can see it becoming exponentially more useful. I’m already compiling a wish list of sites I’d like to see added.

Some of this sort of functionality is available in standalone Firefox extensions but I like the idea of a single app that pulls it all together. It’s lightweight and the integrated toolbar is really handy.

The RoamAbout extension is available for free download for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

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