Using facebook on the new Yahoo! home page

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Praveen

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."

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Posted in Yahoo! | 29 Comments

Merry Christmas!

Posted on December 25, 2008 by Praveen

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]

Posted in Festivals | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Blog post directly from Yahoo! Mail

Posted on December 24, 2008 by Praveen

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

Posted in Yahoo! | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Google Friend Connect Launched

Posted on December 4, 2008 by Praveen

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.
setup site

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.
add member gadget

Anyone having a Google Id, Yahoo! Id, AIM Id or OpenID can connect with a site through the member gadget.
login support

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]

Posted in Google | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Gmail has got themes, so?

Posted on November 21, 2008 by Praveen

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.

themes-1.jpg

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]

Posted in Google | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments