Yoono, the social network browser plugin that relaunched in May, has entered public beta. The company has also announced a $4 million extension to their Series A funding round led by AGF Private Equity.

Yoono has existed for a number of years but has recently reinvented itself, offering a retooled browser sidebar for Firefox that serves as both a social network feed aggregator and a media-rich content sharing tool. The sidebar can be configured with a number of different widgets that include a Flickr photo viewer and a music player. You can see our review of Yoono’s relaunched plugin here.

The company intends to use the funds to help keep up with its growing user base, and would also like to expand the widgets available on its platform. Yoono faces competition from a number of other browser plugins like Minggl and from Flock, the web browser that has been tailored for social networks.

It’s funny. It was just last week that I went on a mini-rant about the seemingly endless wave of social network aggregators we’ve been seeing. Maybe I was just sick of programs that had a lot of potential but didn’t do much to set themselves apart. Because after spending an evening with the newest version of Yoono, I’m quite ready to come out as a full-fledged hypocrite. I think I’ve found a social network aggregator plugin I might actually use.

Yoono’s main draw at this point is its “Friends” widget, which offers all the features you’d expect from a social network aggregator. The widget compiles all updates from Twitter, Facebook, Piczo, Flickr, and Friendfeed, and displays them in a scrollable list. After clicking a person’s name, you are presented with direct links to their profiles, photo albums, or messaging pages, which cuts out a lot of tedious navigation. The widget also features integration with most of the major chat clients (AIM, MSN, etc), along with the ability to send out status updates to any profile. So far, so good (though pretty standard).

What really sets Yoono apart is its slick UI. As you browse through your list of friends, you can mouse-over any contact to get a popup summary of their latest profile and status updates. Hover over any of the thumbnail sized photos shown in the widget, and you’ll see a full-sized version overlayed across your browser, all without ever leaving the page you were browsing.

Besides “Friends”, Yoono offers five other widgets that can be added and removed at will. The most useful is “Discoveries”, a carryover from Yoono’s original incarnation that we’ve described as a mix of StumbleUpon and del.icio.us. The widget analyzes the pages you visit and presents a number of relevant tags and related sites, along with a list of Yoono users who share similar interests. “Web Notes” acts as a rudimentary collaboration tool that lets you drag images, text, and video into the side bar for future reference or sharing with friends.

The rest of the widgets are media oriented, and are significantly less polished. “Photos” allows you to browse Flickr images relevant to the page you’re read, while “Videos” lets you browse through YouTube.

If Yoono has one major fault, it’s that it has too much to offer and not enough space to do it in. Navigating the Friends list within the sidebar is difficult if you’ve got any other widgets open - there just isn’t enough room. Each widget can be broken off of the sidebar into a separate window, but this is only useful if you’ve got some extra space on your screen (and you could just as easily use a desktop client in this case).

Yoono is going to draw a lot of (apt) comparisons to Flock, but as a plugin it might be able to target a bigger market. Yoono is currently available in private beta for Firefox, with an IE version on the way. For those looking to try it out, we’ve got 500 beta invites, which can you can grab here.

Social surfing recommendation site Yoono has released a new plugin “Buzz It” that takes services such as Google Notebook to a new level.

Most people would be familiar with notebook and scrapbook style sites and plugins. You can add notes, reminders and links. Buzz It takes those basics and incorporates a rich Web 2.0 experience.

The plugin is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox and installs a new toolbar. It’s an initial negative that can be fixed. Relevant buttons on the toolbar (in Firefox) can be dragged onto existing place holders at the top of the browser.

Recording sites or notes with Buzz It is as simple as highlighting text or a page, then pressing a button or using the right click menu. An Ajax overlay appears with the relevant information. The plugin pulls images and videos from any site being viewed and then displays those results in the Buzz It sidebar, empowering drag and drop functionality into an entry. Amazon book links and even Google Maps can be generated inline and added to any post.

Buzz It also doubles as a blog posting tool. Most major platforms are supported and it’s one of the better blog posting tools I’ve used. It needs some work, the markup generated is below average and images posted are served from the original site and are not reposted locally; however for a MySpace user or casual blogger these are not going to be major issues. It’s simple, clean and easy to use.

The plugin integrates with Yoono’s social surfing recommendation platform and comes with the usual site recommendation style tools typical of this sort of service. If you’re in to this sort of thing then it’s one of the better services out there and currently boasts of having over 700,000 members.

Yes, Buzz It another plugin with (OMG!) another toolbar but looking past this I can honestly say that it is impressive. It’s smart, cool looking and is bound to have a broad range of appeal.

Yoono, the Firefox and IE link suggestion plugin, recently added blog and article suggestions to their product. The new suggestions have been added to the top of Yoono’s sidebar and show stories related to the page you’re currently viewing. For instance, a trip to Techcrunch yields the results pictured to the right.

Yoono is sort of like Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon combined. Instead of staggering around the internet or searching through tagged links, Yoono gives you a list of suggestions in their sidebar or ticker based on what page you are actively surfing. It doesn’t maintain your surfing history. Suggestions are generated based on an analysis of the bookmarks and live bookmarks (RSS feeds) shared by their over 140,000 users. By looking at the bookmarks users share in common and how they are organized by folders, Yoono finds related links. Each of those links is then given a popularity score based in part on the number of users sharing that page as a bookmark. Last month they were serving up over six million suggestions per day.

I find the new feature a useful addition the Yoono and actually got drawn into following along the thread of suggested blog articles covering Bill Gate’s most recent appearance. However, the service still needs some tweaking. Every once in a while I get suggestions in languages I can’t read or repeats of stories from blogs containing multiple overlapping feeds. The new suggestions do fill a gap in the product by providing more frequently changing suggestions for each site. The community’s bookmarks just don’t change frequently enough to create new suggestions for pages I visit frequently. Yoono has also been toying with another idea to solve this problem, short-term bookmarks that clean up after themselves by expiring after a given time period.

For more on article suggestions, check out SphereIt.