Google Friend Connect Launched
I got an email from Google last night which said that my email id was whitelisted for using friend connect. Google friend connect is the approach google has taken for solving the social networking puzzle. It allows users to add gadgets(opensocial) to their sites/blogs. More about google friend connect here.
Setting up a site
Setting up friend connect on my blog was pretty simple. Added two files to my web server, filled up a couple of forms and done.
Adding gadgets
Right now there are only few gadgets available, gadgets are categorized into member gadgets(#2) and social gadgets(#5). The member gadget looks very similar to the MyBlogLog widget.
Anyone having a Google Id, Yahoo! Id, AIM Id or OpenID can connect with a site through the member gadget.
As of now I have added two gadgets(members & wall) to my blog. Not sure if they’re gonna stay here for a long time 
Other than adding gadgets, there are more options like moderate posts, members & a very basic graph showing the user activity on the site, all these options are available for site admin only.
As of now friend connect looks very simple with less features and a handful of gadgets. The quality of gadgets will tell how much of an impact friend connect can make.
Tags: google, friend, connect, opensocial, beta, social, networking
Gmail has got themes, so?
I am not going to use any one of those funky, blurry themes for my gmail account.
But why?
Most of the first 7-8 themes I tried out are either too dull or way to bright for my eyes. None of them do a great job at differentiating old & new messages from my inbox. Everything looks the same, what’s the use of all these themes which don’t highlight the difference between unread and read mails.
Anything weird?
Oh yes, but this has nothing to do with the new themes gmail has launched (I guess so).
I noticed that gmail loads eight 8×8 pixel images on the gmail home page. I don’t see those images being used anywhere. The other possible reason I can think of is tracking.
If tracking is all what gmail wants then why not use a 0.04KB (1×1 px) image instead of using a 0.14KB (8×8px) image.
Is gmail b0rked?
Yes it is! A blog post was pending on this one for a long time now.
Try adding a contact to your contacts list in the gmail standard view (with or without chat enabled).
Go to contact’s, click on ‘New Contact’ icon on top left & done.
Here’s the best part.
Now switch to basic HTML mode (this mode get’s enabled when a uses is on a slow connection by default).
and now try adding a contact to your contacts list.
Go to contacts, and then what? where is the option to add a new contact.
It’s really funny to see that gmail doesn’t have the most basic feature of adding a contact in basic HTML view. FAIL.
Please leave a comment if you figure out a way (or when gmail fixes this) to add contacts in gmail from the basic HTML view.
Gmail get’s away with these small but important features by sticking a ‘BETA’ sticker on it’s logo every time.
Let the music play
Yahoo! search(along with Rhapsody) launched this very cool feature where in a user can listen to a full song without navigating away from the search results page. I remember seeing this player on YDN a couple of months ago.
Very cool UI and works on safari too
Click here to checkout the player. There is a limit of 25 songs/month.
I’ll miss you songza
Google Chrome, Oops! Did that hurt?
Got back from my friends apartment after watching ‘The Shawshank Redemption’, my twitter stream is overflowing with tweets about Chrome - the browser unleashed by Google a couple of hours ago.
It’s got the oomph factor and the browser is cool (I’m running it on Win XP using Parallels) too.
Download chrome
If you’re looking out for the feature list, you might just go read it here. I’ll try and list some of the things which didn’t work as expected(at least for me).
Corp URL?
I hit the known product issues URL just to check for any document issues. Bling bling, two redirects and boy there you go, I hit some google corp url.
Collect statistics
Collect statistics option is turned on by default, you might just wanna turn this option off for security reasons.
JavaScript console
The JavaScript console looks neat, but only to know that it doesn’t work as I thought it would. It worked only for the first time I launched chrome.</oops!>
Google gears
Chrome has built in support for gears.
Shortcuts
Enter about:memory in the address bar to see memory used by chrome and other open browsers (if any).
about: will give built information about chrome.
There is a javascript debugger, javascript console and a task manager in the developer section.
With all said, I must say ‘It’s Nice’.
Oh! and this whole new theme change and thingy happened last evening.
Story behind the new profile pic
It’s been almost a year since I changed my profile pic on the web. Looking back in time reminds me of the days when I had no options to change my profile pic, simply because I didn’t have a pic on the computer. A scanned copy of my snap was the closest I could get to change my profile pic.
And now, with too many options, it gets difficult to decide which one to use. After a bit of digging, I found a picture which looks very similar to the default avatar on Yahoo! messenger for Mac.
