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Google has shut down their Chinese site(http://google.cn). I saw something interesting while looking at the HTTP headers used by Google for the redirect.

Both the URLs google.com and google.com.cn use a 302 redirect to redirect traffic to Google HK and that’s perfectly fine. The redirected URL doesn’t look clean, not only is it NOT clean, I have a feeling they use URL GET parameters to keep track of some statistics.

Here’s how a sample header looked like:

        http://www.google.cn/

	GET / HTTP/1.1
	Host: www.google.cn
	User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6
	Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
	Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
	Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
	Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
	Keep-Alive: 115
	Connection: keep-alive
	Cookie: --removed for good--

	HTTP/1.1 302 Found
	Location: http://www.google.com.hk/url?sa=p&cki=PREF%3DID%3D024bad9e5afabff3:U%3D957ffb38d60fef2f:FF%3D2:LD%3Dzh-CN:TM%3D1269345133:LM%3D1269345324:S%3DokxQi9JZRpNOay9b&q=http://www.google.com.hk/&ust=1269345354859186&usg=AFQjCNGD11Zf8ak_X-V_y6RPXiFMeHqUQg
	Cache-Control: private
	Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
	Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 11:55:24 GMT
	Server: gws
	Content-Length: 459
	X-XSS-Protection: 0

Most of it is pretty boring stuff, but check the Location URL again. I tried hitting the URL a couple of times and it looks like Google is using a very lazy way to keep track of the users redirected from Google china to Google HK.

ust = User Stats?

I looked at the traffic for a few minutes and here are the numbers I got. All of them in pretty sweet increasing order.

1269345163308698
1269345240966267
1269345306123236
1269345354859186
1269345574993411

This could be real or just something I got completely wrong

Yahoo! has rolled out a new homepage that allows you to get updates from social networking sites like Flickr, Facebook, Yahoo! Profiles and more. It even allows you to view Gmail on Yahoo! front page.

Read this article to get more information about the homepage – Yahoo! Corp Blog

This post is mainly for people who are having problems connecting facebook and Yahoo!

If you have already added facebook on the Yahoo! homepage and are unable to view facebook, follow the instructions mentioned below. The screen which comes again and again should look somewhat like this.

Step 1
Login to facebook and mouse over on the Settings tab. Click on Application Settings

Step 2
Select the Authorized option from the dropdown from that page.

Step 3
Remove the Yahoo! application from the list(Click on the x). It should be somewhere at the bottom of the page, watch out for a purple Y! logo. A confirmation screen will appear, select Remove.

Step 4
Now open the new Yahoo! home page and click on Edit.

Step 5
Search for facebook application and remove it(click on the small x), click the I’m Done button.

Step 6
Now click on the Add option, search for the facebook application and add it.

At this time, we have successfully removed the facebook application from Yahoo! homepage & revoked the permissions on Facebook. Now we just have to mouse over on the facebook app & follow the instructions. Everything should work fine.
I’m listing down the steps to make things easier for you’ll.

Step 7
Mouse over on the facebook application on the Yahoo! home page, this is how your screen should look. Click on login to facebook.

Step 8
Click on Connect

Step 9
Select Allow Access

Step 10
Select the Continue option for "Allow Yahoo! to access my News Feed and Wall"

Step 11
Select the Allow Publishing option on the next screen

Step 12 (Last step)
Select the Allow Offline Access option. After selecting the allow offline access option, the page will refresh and you will be taken to the Yahoo! home page.

Mouse over on the facebook tab and enjoy!

This is a quick fix for the problem, YMMV. Leave a comment if this worked for you or you faced any other problem. I’ll see if I can help you.

[Update] Yahoo! is working with Facebok to get this resolved as soon as possible

Comment from Yahoo! product team:

"Hi, I’m Andy from the Yahoo! product team. I’m sorry that it’s still not working for all users but please know that we are working hard with Facebook to get this resolved as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and feedback. We’ll keep you updated."

Tags: yahoo, new, homepage, facebook, flickr, gmail, mail

Merry Christmas everyone!

This black box is for the people who can’t see the snow effect on my blog, courtesy ‘Let It Snow!‘ plugin by Aen Tan.

Happy Holidays, Have fun!

[tags]merry, christmas, snow, wordpress, plugin, new year[/tags]

You read it right, this blog post comes straight from my yahoo! mail account. I’m using the WordPress plugin from the applications section in my mail box. Setting up the blog to write this blog post was a 1 step process.

Step 1: Give the XML-RPC url of the blog along with user credentials. Done.

There are a bunch of other applications like Family Journal, Flickr, Flixter, Xoopit and more. I’m haven’t tried them out yet. I think the time has come where I can modify the mailbox to my needs by adding/writing new apps.

A review of Yahoo! Mail applications will follow soon

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[/tags]

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 (8x8px) 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.

[tags]google, mail, gmail, themes, b0rked[/tags]

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

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.

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.

[tags]profile, avatar, messenger, mac[/tags]

We finally have a date, its 17th June 2008. All you have to do is download firefox on that day and help firefox set a Guinness world record for most downloads of a software in 24 hours. 1,226,933 people from all over the world have pledged to download firefox on the download day. I see only 22, 045 pledges from India. On the fun side, Host a party or find one nearby and enjoy on the download day. As of now there are 537 parties and 3137 party goers.
Add-ons support in firefox 3 is getting better day by day, I hope to see all my favorite add-ons in FF3 by this month end.

Go ahead and fill up the pledge form to get reminders & results of the record attempt.

[tags]mozilla, firefox, download, firefox3 [/tags]