Theme party

It doesn’t matter what they say, looks really do matter. Looks, shoes, intelligence and a great sense of humour.

Given that Google Chrome obviously has intelligence, and that good shoes and a sense of humour would be pretty hard attributes for a web browser to attain (there’s only so much techies can achieve), that leaves us with looks. Something Google Chrome now officially has thanks to their Theme Gallery going live.

If you go here you will find 29 sparkly new colourful themes – some a 10 on the swimsuit competition scale and some a 1, but all more than just a pretty face – just waiting for you to click on the ‘Apply Theme’ button. The theme will then download and in the download manager at the bottom of the Chrome browser window you can simply select ‘Open’. Voila.

You’ll need to be using Google Chrome 3 to install the themes, which work on both Windows and OS X. Quick tip though: some of the themes will apparently not load unless you are in the ‘Dev’ channel… see the Chrome Channel Chooser to help you out with this unexpected twist. Otherwise, happy theme party.

Speaking of parties, you know how in that movie ‘Old School’ all Frank the party animal’s friends call him ‘Frank the Tank’? Well, if Frank the Tank were the social networking type, he could now check the availability of his nickname across a number of social media sites and then put all his web profiles in a single place under just that one name.

Check out FriendsCall.me, a ‘Username Checker & Identity Aggregator’, as they call themselves. Which is another way of saying they’re a really simple way of checking if the username you really want to use (and which all your friends will immediately recognise) is registered on more than 150 popular websites. It’s also an easy way to organize and share where all your profiles are on the web.

The good folk at Mashable broke it down into three simple sentences for us:
1. Friendscall.me helps you to conduct a username availability check across a number of social networks and social media sites.
2. It acts as identity aggregator by gathering all your web profiles at a single place, accessible by a url of the format friendscall.me/yourname.
3. It notifies you when a new social media site comes up so that you can quickly register the desired username with them.

Basically, Friendscall.me is a pretty useful tool for the partying socialite of the media-networking variety.