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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.