Merry Christmas!
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!
Blog post directly from Yahoo! Mail
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
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