My new buddy - [email protected]

To start with this blog, I would like to thank Google reader team and news sites which helped keeping myself updated with the latest techie stuff and news. Thanks to all the tech forums and my fellow bloggers. Last week was a busy one for me in the office with the new project shaping up. Somehow, took advantage of the mid-week break (Ganesh Chaturthi) and tried out the things which are rocking the Tech world recently. Google's Chrome, Imified, Picasa New features, etc.

IMified

Imified is a service using which we can create IM bots. Here is my buddy - [email protected]. IMified basically converts all the IMs coming for the buddies and transfer them to the service URL provided. For info on the mostly used IM bots, click here. Also, for writing your own IM bot, refer this article. I have registered for one as soon as I read this. But, my bot came online only recently. The same article appears in Digg home page. Due to the 'Digg Effect', IMified was not able to hold the load. All the bots were down for almost a week. Hurray! my bot is back online today and its working fine. [email protected]. Add him to your buddy list. This guy gets an URL and shortens it. (uses http://tinyurl.com for now). Most of you might be using twitters. This bot might come handy then. Also, I am working on building a new service similar to tinyurl. Not to make it commercial, just to try out Google App Engine. Till then, I will be using tinyurl.

More services to follow. Keep checking the features by typing 'help' in IM to know more about it.

Google Chrome

I was greatly disappointed when I tried to install Google Chrome. It requires admin rights to install (and, I dont have it in my office PC and my good old friend Toshiba is sitting at home). Then, I thought of building it from source, but, then, it has pre-requisites like Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (8.0), Windows SDK. With nothing to do, I just kept reading various blogs and forums on Chrome. Just a day after Chrome was released, Carsten released a portable version of Chrome. Link here. Got my luck then. Installed it and trying out. The experiments continue from there...

From my first level of usage, I found the UI to be simple and pleasing. But, not convinced with its privacy and history options. It is indexing the mail contents. Even after signing out of my mail, it allows anybody to search the contents from my mailbox (though they can not open the mail, mail contents shouldn't be indexed).

Some of my friends tried to crash Chrome and succeeded in their attempts (Its an obvious case as he tried to open as many as tabs as possible till it cries). Also, learnt from some forums that typing ":%" in address bar of Chrome. Not sure if this is a known bug. I cant rate this as of now.