A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a promising new startup while searching for a hosted group chat solution.

Besides being feature-rich and easy to use, HipChat allows you to write your own client by exposing an XMPP entry-point.

If you have never heard of XMPP it is a common chat protocol used by services such as Google Talk and Facebook Chat.

Since its revamp in 2010, most of the magic in Grooveshark happens on the client-side. I will not be talking about these technologies as it was already covered by Jerod Santo's post: The Tech Behind the New Grooveshark.

What I'd like to address is the data exchanges between the client and the server when you hit the play button and the search button.

Today I had an itch to look into how Google generates the preview thumbnails when you do a search.

A couple of days ago Chris needed a way to see how a particular client was interacting with a server. Obviously there are numerous ways to do this, but I was curious how easy it would be to implement something similar with a quick netcat command. Sure enough after a little bit of fiddling I was able to produce exactly what he needed…