I was checking out some stats for my website with Google's Webmaster Tools, and what did I see?

Google moved https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/diagnostic to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/diagnostics (notice the trailing "s") without setting up any sort of redirect. Google: how are search engines going to find you if you don't set up proper redirects??

I was just about to search for how to get height of browser window, when Google suggested something much more worthy of my time:

I just saw this ad next to a GMail message about ScribeFire:

There must be a better method for finding an amnesic Johnny Depp than poorly targeted Google ads.

Inside the official announcement of some upgrades to Google Documents is this section about the new "folders" feature:

"Almost from the day we launched people have been clamoring for folders. They're here! [...] documents can live in more than one folder at a time."

I don't know about you, but where I come from, that's not a folder; it's a tag. A folder is meant to be a real-world representation of a manila file folder, and I don't know of many real-world documents that can bend the fabric of space to be in two different file folders at once.

In order to avoid watering down the definitions of both tags and folders, Google should call a spade a spade and a tag a tag.

Why do people only write formal letters to corporations when they have a problem? It's like the college-aged child who only writes home when he needs money. I'd like to see more of this:

Dear Google,

How are things with you? I'm doing well, if you were wondering. Congratulations on your DoubleClick acquisition; it sounds like you really burned Microsoft's biscuits on that one! LOL What else are you up to these days? Just thought I'd drop you a line.

Have a good one,

Chris

P.S. What are you doing on Friday - want to grab some beers? I'll send you an invite on Facebook.

Come on, let's show our favorite mega-companies how much they mean to us with some no-strings-attached correspondence.

I've decided to retire GoogleTabs, one of the very first extensions I ever wrote. GoogleTabs adds a context-menu option to open all of the Google search results on the current page in tabs.

I made this decision for several reasons:

• I don't have time to keep up with Google. Every time they change the HTML for any of their search result pages, I have to update the extension and release a new version.
• I don't use the extension. All of my other extensions came about to fill one of my browsing needs, and in a few cases, other people found the extension useful as well. Since I never really used GoogleTabs, I don't feel the same need to keep it current.
• There are better solutions. There are other extensions like Snap Links and Linky that do the same thing, but on a wider scale. It doesn't make sense to have a Google-specific version when you can have one extension that mass-opens links on all webpages.

According to Mozilla Addons, GoogleTabs was downloaded a total of 95,322 times (plus the downloads directly from my site), so it had a pretty good run. Rest in peace, GoogleTabs.

Google has added a traffic overlay to its map service, and they've miraculously included the Twin Cities metro area.

I never go anywhere, but my wife is going to love this.

Now that Google Reader is reporting the number of users subscribed to a feed, I can finally tell that there are 35 people using Google Reader to read my feed. I wouldn't have thought that 35 people *total* subscribed to my feed, but judging by what the other user-agents are reporting, about 50 people use a Web-based feed aggregator to subscribe to my blog. Neat!