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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

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]

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.

Don’t know if this feature is for testing or a full release. I’ve not come across this anywhere on the web (may be i’m too ignorant to notice this feature). The other possibility is – I always have cookies disabled for *.google.com :p in Firefox. Don’t remember reading about this anywhere either.

Its something like this:

• Login to your google account
• Search for any keyword, e.g movies
• Click on any link & then hit the browser back button
• Just hit refresh after you are back on the search results page
• Time will be displayed across the link which you visited (clicked on)

If you happen to visit the page more than once, the search results page will display the number of times the page is visited by you.
This feature will not work if you are not logged in to your google account.

Didn’t find this feature working fully correct, specially the number of visits shown across a link in search results page.

[tags]google, search, time, search results [/tags]

After finance quotes now its time for the videos to appear on the search results page. Just came across a youtube video indexed by google search. Clicking on the the traditional plus button opened up the youtube video right below the search results (autoplay). Check screeshot.

[tags]google, search, youtube, searchresults, yahoo[/tags]

The new youtube player has got a lot of updates to it. Firstly they have changed the loading indicator which appears before the video starts loading. Other features are, jumping ahead to a part of video without actually waiting for the video to fully load.
While the video is playing, clicking on the menu button will restore the video (in playing mode) to the top-left corner and display a list of relative videos at the bottom of the player. The best thing about this relative videos feature is that the user will remain engaged to the site for a much longer time. The relative videos are shown in a mac – like style. The share options are also changed. The ratings are also diaplayed at the bottom right as we hover the relative video thumbnails.

[tags]youtube, upgrades, video, player, google[/tags]

Got an orkut teaser from my friend this morning. Logged in to orkut & saw a b/w feeds button on the left. Clicked on edit feeds button, did the captcha & voila … got my flickr and delicious feeds on the orkut profile page. Nice and simple. I must say this is one of the coolest feature orkut has added till date. Unlike the videos feature, this time they have no restriction on the feeds which can be added. The add video feature ion orkut is still restricted to youtube & google videos.

The native rss button on the left says edit feeds, but all what it allows to do is add & delete feeds. The feeds are visible to all the people who can see your profile. It would be nice if they define access levels for feeds. Something like restrict the feeds to friends or certain groups. But to start off… Its a real nice feature. How about getting some meshed up feeds from Yahoo! pipes.

Now thats what I call social networking.

[tags]orkut, rss, feeds, socialnetworking, networking[/tags]

Google re-launches its personalized home page as iGoogle. The newer version of Google IG comes with some interesting features like a theme selector and widgets. Some of the popular widgets are AIM Messenger, MSN Messneger, Youtube, Free Text Messages (which doesn’t work in India ) and lot of them, didn’t try most of them.

Argggghhhhh.My browser crashed .. (the chat gadget did it all); Thanks to the auto save feature by WP.

They seem to have removed the Y! Messenger widget from the popular category(which was there some time back). I tried the Y! Messenger widget & even that worked out in a strange way(see screen shot – Widget title mismatch).

Overall, The iGoolge stuff looks nice; lot of options when it comes to widgets, a few themes and most importantly its buggy. So save your work before you try out iGoogle ( not every one is lucky to have an auto save feature )