Google Blog (Picture courtesy: Google Blog)

Google has been blogging for more than five years now. Their first post was in April 2004 and since then 423 post have been published and last year they were read by more than 14,493,472 readers.

Google released their blog’s top 10 posts of 2009, by unique pageviews:

1. Introducing the Google Chrome OS – 2,591,794 unique pageviews (more than 12 percent of the year’s total). The announcement of our open source operating system received more than 4x the views of any other post.
2. Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave – 639,225. Wave-mania struck after we introduced a new product for collaboration and communication at our Google I/O conference.
3. Here comes Google Voice – 357,084. We released a preview of this application to help you better manage your voice communications.
4. “This site may harm your computer” on every search result?!?! – 320,435. A short-lived error affecting Google search results led to confusion and concern; this post cleared it up.
5. Email in Indian languages – 224,052. A transliteration feature in Gmail that makes it easier to type in Indian languages was a hit. More than one million readers of the blog in 2009 were from India — a 53 percent increase over 2008.
6. Releasing the Chromium OS open source project – 217,424. A few months after announcing our operating system project, we open-sourced it as Chromium OS.
7. Now you see it, now you don’t – 165,329. We introduced a new, clean version of our classic homepage.
8. Google Apps is out of beta (yes, really) – 164,319. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk all lost their beta tags (in Gmail’s case, after five years!).
9. Now S-U-P-E-R-sized! – 155,196. A “small” change increasing the size of the Google search box got a lot of attention.
10. Introducing Google Public DNS – 143,122. We launched our public DNS resolver, which converts domain names into unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers.

I remember I did signed up for Yahoo 360° (in early 2006) but never used it later. The only country where Y! 360° is popular is Vietnam, so for them Y! has created another product specifically targeting Vietnamese people [Yahoo 360 in Vietnamese].

I don’t think this closure of 360 is going to have any real impact in social networking world (read Facebook, Twitter, etc) but it is still another product from Yahoo which is now being taken off (Briefcase, Photos, etc). Seems like Yahoo is streamlining their offerings and trying to consolidate/aggregate their products.

360° Users have multiple options to import their blog posts:

• Download your blog post and then import into your blog on (WordPress or Blogger).
• Move your blog post to your Yahoo! profile.

More information on preparation for the closing of Yahoo! 360° can be found here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/360/shutdown/

While searching for alternatives I came across a very simple and useful way to create your very own ReTweet button and your own version of URL shortener.

Step 1) Create your own shortened URL for your blog entries:

For WordPress, create a folder within the root of your domain/blog (here http://bawaal.com/blog/). Name the folder “go”, or something equally short. Then make a .htaccess file in the newly created directory and include the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ([0-9]+) /index.php?p=$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.*) / [R=301,L]

Note: Windows may not allow you to create a file names “.htaccess” so you can create any text file in your local machine e.g. “temp.txt” using notepad and copy the above code into it. Transfer this file to newly created directory ["go"] on your blog server and rename it to .htaccess

Step 2) Create Re-Tweet Button:
You can use an image or a text to create a hyperlink to ReTweet your post. Below is the code I use for my posts:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=RT @shankybaba <?php
the_title(); ?> – <?php echo get_bloginfo (‘url’);
?>/go/<?php echo $post->ID ?>”><img src=”/files/retweet-btn.jpg”/></a>

All you have to do is to replace “@shankybaba” with your “@twitterid” and if you named your directory containing .htaccess file something else than “go” and use that name in the above code.

Step 3) Add the above URL code to your WordPress template:

Single Post (single.php): For the retweet button to appear on post single pages.

In this blog site I have placed the below code to appear alongwith the title of the post:

<h2><?php the_title(); ?><a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=RT @shankybaba <?php the_title(); ?> – <?php echo get_bloginfo (‘url’); ?>/go/<?php echo $post->ID ?>”><img src=”/files/retweet-btn.jpg”/></a></h2>

Main Page (index.php): For the retweet button to appear on the main page along with each posts.

In this blog site I have placed the below code just after the comments code for each post:
<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=RT @shankybaba <?php the_title(); ?> – <?php echo get_bloginfo (‘url’); ?>/go/<?php echo $post->ID ?>”><img src=”/files/retweet-btn.jpg”/></a>

Benefits of using this method:

• You have full control over the ReTweet ID (instead of @tweetmeme)
• The most important thing is that all the URL now includes your domain name unlike tinyurl or bit.ly
• Web crawlers (for any search engine) won’t able to comprehend shortened url like [bit.ly] or [tinyurl]
• Using 3rd party shortened URL unjustifyably denies the visibility of your domain name which can deprive your domain the popularity you expected.

With HelloTxt you can post your status once and have it appear automatically on all of your networks, allowing you to keep all of your friends up to date with ease. It also lets you read your friends’ updates from main microblogging and social networks all at once.

My Test

Testing hellotxt! Lets see if my status gets updated when I update my Blog!

Test case: I posted a new post on my blogging site (i.e. this post on this website) and I expected HelloTxt to update the new post as status update on my social network profiles (Twitter, Facebook, etc).

Procedure:

1) Sign-up at HelloTxt

2) Download WordPress plugin from [http://hellotxt.com/app/wp-plugin/hellotxt.zip]

3) Upload `hellotxtpost.php` to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory (using any ftptool)

4) Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

5) Go-to HelloTxt Settings Page and click Tools and API

6) Copy the value of user_key from step 5

7) Open Admin screen of wordpress blog and goto Plugin Editor and copy the value of user_key (step 6) [check in a function named function send_to_hellotxt($post_ID) in the plugin file]

Your plugin should work now [Atleast mine works ]