Google goes colorful like Bing. Now you can put any images as the background of your Google home page. Google puts a link “Change background image” at the bottom left of the home page for changing the background. You need to login to your Google account before changing the background.

Rather than have a daily image served to you like Bing does, Google lets you select an image from your own computer, your Picasa album, Picasa featured images and images recommended by Google. Google recommend that your background Images must be at least 800 x 600 pixels and in one of the following formats: .jpeg, .tif, .tiff, .bmp, .gif, .psd (Photoshop), .png, .tga, and selected RAW formats.

This new feature is independent of iGoogle. Checkout Google’s official blog post here for more details

Treegger IM is a service that lets you to chat with your twitter friends (bidirectional follow relationship only). You can chat directly with your twitter friends without sending tweet. Treegger does not store any data, credentials or messages, all contents just transit between you and our servers using secure connection (TLS).

Treegger is based on XMPP it works with Pidgin, Adium, Miranda, iChat and any XMPP supporting IM client.

Configuring your IM client for Twitter

Any XMPP Client

For any XMPP client software you should use following setup:
Jabber ID: [your twitter account name]@twitter (for example ‘nikhilvishnu@twitter’)
Connect Server: xmpp.treegger.com with port 5223
Allow plaintext authentication (twitter doesn’t provide any other authentication method yet)
SSL/TLS (old style) required and selected

Pidgin

Username : your twitter handle
Domain : twitter
Connect server : xmpp.treegger.com
Connect port : 5223

What is Twitter @Anywhere?

Twitter @Anywhere is a platform that brings the functionality of twitter on to different websites. Now most of the twitter activities are hanging around the twitter home page and the tools which access twitter through its API. @Anywhere is a service which is similar to the facebook connect which allows websites to build community around their website. @Anywhere is more simple than facebook connect you need to have more technical knowledge for setting up facebook connect in your website.

Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone writes

Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more.

Checkout a sample anywhere implementation by placing mouse over my twitter handle @nikhilvishnu. You will see a hovercard!!!.

Setting up @Anywhere in your site

Here we are going to set up @Anywhere to get the hovercards which shows a popup over the twitter handles showing the follow button and profile description. @Anywhere provides the following features.

• Auto-linkification of @ usernames
• Hovercards
• Follow buttons
• Tweet Box
• User login & signup

For integrating this to the website you only need to add a few lines of java script into the site source code. You can do it in three simple steps

Step1:  Register your website at Twitter Anywhere

Twitter @Anywhere is working like a twitter application so that you have to register your website in the twitter developer site. Go to anywhere official site and register your website by providing the details.

Twitter Anywhere registration

Step2: Add JavaScript to the header

You need to add a line of JavaScript to the header as follows

<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/anywhere.js?id=YourAPIKey&v=1"> </script>

You can find the API Key in the application details. For including this in a webpage just copy and paste this code with the API key before the </head> tag. If you are wanted to include it in your word press site include this script in header.php file located in the theme folder.

Finding Twitter Anywhere API Key

Step3: Add JavaScript to the footer

The final step for setting up twitter anywhere is adding some javascript into the footer of the site. Footer means you can include the code right before the tag </body>. Including the following code will enable the hovercards in the page.

<script>

twttr.anywhere(function(twitter) {

twitter.hovercards();

});

</script>

You can customise this code further by specifying the areas where the twitter scan for a username. Since this code contains no such specifications twitter scan the entire page and attach a hovercard over each twitter user mentioned after the ‘@’ symbol.

This is a most simple implementation of the twitter @Anywhere platform. You can find more details about the Anywhere platform and its documentation here

Finally Google fans in Kerala (including me) launched Kerala Google Technology User Group in Trivandrum yesterday. I was eagerly waiting to attend the function after registering for the event. The event was really a superb one. All sessions were good. But the only thing I missed was the wifi( I missed Twitter).  Event was also broadcasting live from the venue.

Kerala GTUG Introduction & Launch by Sreejumon

Sreejumon is the man behind this venture. He is currently working with Nokia R&D Center Bangalore. He started the meeting with a talk about GTUG’s. He also detailed the structure and the way of functioning of Kerala GTUG. Then he introduced some books related to Google technology. These books are decided to put in the GTUG library starting at the premises of KeLNet. He concluded his speech by inviting Praseed Pai for taking a session on How Google Changed the Software Development Landscape.

Praseed pai taking session on How Google Changed the Software Development Landscape

As always Praseed Pai started his talk by showing the photo of a person. It was Rajeev Motwani , co-author of influential paper on the PageRank algorithm. He explained the working of PageRank algorithm and another algorithm that is mostly used in cloud computing. He showed that how Google changed the machine centric development into web centric development.

Session by Anash Oommen on Chrome Extension

After a short tea break Anash Oommen took a session on Chrome Extension. Anash Oommen is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google, and works to promote Google’s APIs and technologies. His session was really informative. He showed a demo of making a Google chrome extension. Session also discussed the architecture and working of chrome extensions.

Google Tips and Tricks by Sreejumon

In the lunch break I met lots of tweepls. I was really excited by seeing my followers out there J.  Next session was taken by Sreejumon. He gave some tips and tricks to work with Google. Google playground was a great tip for me.

Rajesh Varghese taking session on Google Tools for Web Developers

Last session was about Google Tools for Web Developers. Rajesh Varghese, Senior Software Engineer at Software Incubator handled the session. He talked about the various tools from Google that can be used for web development. He showed demos of Google analytics, Google webmaster tools etc…

Kerala GTUG launch event attendees

So, Kerala Google Technology Users Group Launch ends up with a bang. Lots of goodies passed to the attendees. I got a Google Tee . Google pens, Google stickers were distributed there. That was really the amazing part of the event.

Overall the event was really rocking one. I managed to get a golden membership in Kerala GTUG. I learned and enjoyed a lot from the event. All the best for Kerala GTUG in coming days.

OAuth (Open Authorization) is an open protocol that allows users to share their protected data under a service provider without sharing their username and password.

Let’s go deep by taking the example of twitter. If you have a twitter account and you want to tweet using a third party application, then that application must be authorised to send tweets. You have to give your username and password to the third party application for sending tweets from your account. Giving away your username and password to a third party is not a good practice. Yeah, you can spot some security vulnerabilities here.

OAuth is the new way of doing this. You can share your data under a service provider to a third party without sharing your username and password.  You can allow a third party application to access your twitter account. Then that application can send tweets and read updates without using your twitter username and password.

Working

Before understanding the OAuth workflow you must be familiar with the following terms. These terms are used in almost all OAuth tutorials.

Service Provider: A web application that allows access via OAuth.

User: An individual who has an account with the Service Provider.

Consumer: A website or application that uses OAuth to access the Service Provider on behalf of the User.

I’m dividing the whole process into three parts. The second part is doing the authorisation process and the process is divided into four steps.

Part 1

The initial step of registering the application is included in this part. First you have to create an application using any OAuth library. Then you have to setup your application (Consumer) in the Service Provider website.  This process will give you a consumer key and consumer secret key. These two keys are unique to your application, and the secret key must be kept securely.

OAuth authentication diagram

Part 2

Here the user is going to authorise the application. To the User this appears to be just clicking on a link. But several requests and responses are happening in the background. This authorisation process is divided into four steps.

Step1: User access the application. Application making an HTTP request to the Service Provider asking for a Request Token.

Step2: Service provider passing the request token and Request Token Secret key to the application. Application will create an authorisation link using the request token. The Request Token Secret key is used by the service provider to identify the consumer (application) . Link is then displayed to the user.

Step3: User authorises the application by clicking on the link. Service provider prompts the user to allow the application. If user allows then service provider redirect the user to the application using callback.

Step4:OAuth callback pass Access Token and Access Token Secret while redirecting to the application. The combination of these keys is used to access user account. So we can save these keys in a database for future use.

Auth authentication process detailed diagram

Part3

Using the user tokens we can start making requests to API. Before submitting each request OAuth system signs the request by taking the consumer and user tokens.

This is how the OAuth system works. Implementing OAuth using any programming language is the next step. I will explain this in another post.

Twitter added a new feature in their search for showing popular tweets at the top of search results. In new twitter search top three search results will be the most popular tweets. The number of retweets for the tweet can be found at the bottom of each popular tweet.

Twitter popular search result

Tweets are featured using an algorithm. They are also using a special account for capturing the top tweets (see that account here).

Twitter toptweets account

This new search  feature is coming to API too. So the search results will be break down into three

mixed: receive both “popular tweets” and most recent tweets for the query. This is the equivalent of the future default behavior.

popular: receive only “popular tweets” for the query.

recent: receive only recent results for the query. This is the equivalent of the behavior you’ve come to expect until present

My twitter friends timeline stopped working 9 hours ago(from the time of writing) . Many twitter users are suffering from the same problem. You can see the tweets about this problem by searching in twitter (for example use “Friends timeline” ).  Not all twitter accounts are affected by this problem. Those who are affected will not see new tweets in their friends timeline. All other timelines (Global,mentions,DM) seems to be working normal.

The serious part of the problem is twitter is not speaking anything about this problem even after 9 hours. They might have updated their status blog with an update. But they are silent.

For now as a quick solution you can use twitter lists as an alternatieve for your friends timeline. Create  a list of friends and it will show their updates in the list. It can be used as an alternate for your friends timeline.

Hope twitter will resolve this issue as early as possible. Well, Its just a Twitquake na?

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited launched 3G services in Kerala. This will help 2.65 lakh 3G mobile phone subscribers in the state avail the 3.5G technology.  The coverage would be available in 21 cities covering all the district headquarters in Kerala.

3G services launched in Kozhikkode on 4th January.  The service will soon encompass all the 14 district headquarters of the state by the end of January.  Apart from these locations, seven more major towns would be 3G equipped by the end of the month. BSNL will invest Rs 650 crore in Kerala for 3G services as well as upgrading 2G network.

As in BSNL 3G site. “3G allows simultaneous use of speech and advanced  data services,  3G technology offers unprecedented quality in voice call as well as a wide range of compelling data services.” . Using the 3G services one could make Video calls, access the internet with speed up to 3.6 Mbps

External Links

BSNL 3G Website

BSNL 3G Application form

May the dawing of this new year open up for you new horizons… Stop thinking and start doing. It is the time to find something new. hopes high, dreams big, promises new, joys afresh. I wish all the readers a Happy and prosperous new year.

Twitter seems to be taking pasword security more seriously, you can’t use easy to gess passwords for your twitter account now. Twitter listed 370 passwords as easy to guess passwords. If you are trying to use simple passwords like ‘password’, ‘abc123′ etc when you are signing up to twitter, it will notify that your password is too obvious to be picked up.

All the banned passwords are coded in the sign-up page of twitter. You can see the banned passwords by checking the source of the twitter sign-up page.

You can access the complete list of 370 banned passwords from here as a .txt file.