The Layers Chrome app offers users a way to visualize what friends are sharing on Twitter and Facebook while also offering users the ability to subscribe to the RSS feeds from their favorite websites.
Lots of companies are working toward better serving shared content to end users. Paper.li and PostPost are two companies targeted at the web browser, while Pulse and Flipboard are focused on mobile and tablet devices.
The Layers Chrome app approach is a bit different. Content is displayed and is browsable via a bar at the bottom of the window. This bar offers previews of links, Facebook status messages, Twitter updates, RSS feed descriptions and linked content like YouTube links, TwitPics and more.
Check out this video to get a sense of what Layers is all about:
The beauty of the system is that the Layers makes it easy to browse what others are sharing — and you can reshare, comment or reply to that content in the web app — but it gets out of the users’ way when needed.
The toolbar can auto-hide content when not in use and a simple mouse hover will bring it back up. The app could use some keyboard shortcut love — especially for those of us who live and die by our keybindings.
Clicking on a link from Facebook, Twitter or an RSS channel can do one of three things. If the content is strictly a link to an external site, that site is loaded in the Layers tab. If the link is to content like a video from YouTube or another supported media type, that content is displayed in the tab alongside the originating message. For status updates that don’t contain links or media, nothing happens. Again, we’d like the ability to visit the Twitter or Facebook status message in the main Layers t ab for those articles...
