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Powered By YouTube – Event Videos and Slides Online

Andrew Bowers — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 22:03:00 +0000

By Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

All of the videos, slides, and other materials used during our first "Powered by YouTube" developer event are now online and available for mass consumption:

http://sites.google.com/site/poweredbyyoutube

We had ~100 developers come and hang out with us at YouTube HQ. It was a full day, with talks ranging from best practices to the history of scaling up YouTube infrastructure and, of course, cookies, lunch and t-shirts. There were also some good discussions in our Office Hours lounge. If you're interested, the one-sheet Code Labs we had for working with the Data APIs in JSON and PHP are also available online.

Thanks to everyone for coming out, learning about the APIs, and sharing your feedback and questions with us. Special thanks goes to Slide, Qik, Animoto, Gaia Online, and Helio for speaking about their experiences working with our APIs and even walking through some code snippets.

As a bonus, here's a bunch of us (Jochen, Jeff, myself) with Steve Mesa, the top poster in our discussion forum :)

Google Developer Days: Opening Registration in Europe

Andrew Bowers — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:54:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Yin, Google Developer Programs

Today, we're opening registration for Google Developer Days in the UK, France, Germany and Spain.

For those of you in other parts of Europe and India, you might be interested in these other upcoming Google Developer Days. We haven't opened registration for them yet, but we wanted to give you a heads up they're coming:

Bangalore, India (Oct 11)
Milan, Italy (Oct 21)
Prague, Czech (Oct 24)
Moscow, Russia (Oct 28)

(Please note Google Developer Day Czech Republic is now on October 24th.)

We'll be there to discuss our APIs and developer tools, diving into topics around App Engine, OpenSocial, Android, and much more. There will also be ample time for mingling with fellow developers and Google engineers. We hope you can join us for these events.

Google I/O recorded sessions now posted

Andrew Bowers — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:16:00 +0000

By Andrew Bowers, Google Developer Programs

If you missed a session you really wanted to see at Google I/O, you'll be happy to know that over
70 of the sessions, as well as the presentation slides, have now been posted.

With 70+ videos at around 60 minutes a piece, that's a lot of lunch breaks one can spend catching up. Being an organizer of the conference, I don't get to sit through many talks myself, so I plan to do just that. Lunch in October, anyone?

OpenSocial Apps and Containers at Google I/O

Andrew Bowers — Fri, 09 May 2008 05:52:00 +0000

Posted by Andrew Bowers, Developer Programs

If you've taken a look at the Google I/O website recently, you may have noticed a number of new sessions by OpenSocial app and container developers. There are now over 15 OpenSocial sessions posted, and over 80 sessions in general. A couple of the new sessions posted include:

OpenSocial, OpenID, and OAuth: Oh, My!:
Joseph Smarr of Plaxo will discuss how OpenId and OAuth can be used with OpenSocial for seamless and efficient identification and authentication.

Apache Shindig - Make Your Social Site an OpenSocial Container:
Dan Peterson from Google will join Paul Linder of hi5, and Chris Chabot to introduce you to the Apache Shindig project, explain how to integrate Shindig with your social site, and show you a demo of the code.

OpenSocial - Scaling and Analytics, Nuts and Bolts:
Nat Brown, CTO of iLike.com, will give an overview of iLike's infrastructure and the places they have invested to make the syndication of their social gadgets quick and easy.

Building on the Promise of OpenSocial
Jeremiah Robison, CTO of Slide, will be speaking on best practices for delivering multiple applications on multiple OpenSocial containers, including addressing architecture, data segmentation, and differences in networks.

Monetizing Application Traffic On Social Networks
Sourabh Niyogi, co-founder and VP of Engineering at Social Media Networks, will be talking about his experiences in growing, monetizing, and measuring traffic.

OpenSocial at MySpace - Implementing the Container:
Chris Bissell, Chief Software Architect of MySpace, will explain the architecture of the MySpace OpenSocial container including how it manages data requests and how it addresses scalability issues.

The event is now less than three weeks away (May 28 - 29). Don't forget to register soon if you haven't already. For those coming from out of town, we've arranged discounted room rates at nearby hotels. Read the details on the website to take advantage of the discount.

See you soon in San Francisco.

New Gears and AJAX sessions posted for Google I/O

Andrew Bowers — Thu, 08 May 2008 06:54:00 +0000

Posted by Andrew Bowers, Google Developer Programs

Google I/O is just a few weeks away (May 28 - 29). If you haven't already, don't forget to register for the event. We now have over 80 sessions posted, including a number of new sessions on Gears and AJAX technologies, including:

Taking Large-Scale Applications Offline - Lessons Learned from Google Docs
With the release of Google Docs offline, we asked the team if they could provide developers with some lessons learned. Google engineer Steve Saviano will explain the challenges that his team faced taking Google Docs offline with Gears and how they overcame them.

Gears and MySpace - an Exploration of Powering Search on the Client
Owyn Richen of MySpace will discuss their thoughts on using Google Gears to provide data-intensive features like adding search to their mail system.

HTML5, Brought to You by Gears
Aaron Boodman, whom many of you know as part of the core Gears team and also from Greasemonkey fame, will be talking about how the Google Gears mission relates to future web standards like HTML5.

Can We Get There From Here?
Alex Russell, co-creator of The Dojo Toolkit, looks at the state of the web development stack and the differing views and approaches to advancing development within a browser.

Improving Browsers in New Ways: Gears++
Chris Prince, also known in the UK as the Gears engineer with the best beard, will give a sneak peek at what's coming in Gears. You may be surprised that *none* of the features are related to offline. Rather, they fall under the broader Gears vision of improving web browsers.

Be sure to visit the website to see the complete list of sessions and to register. For those coming from out of town, we've arranged discounted room rates at nearby hotels. Read the details on the website to take advantage of the discount.

New Gears and AJAX sessions posted for Google I/O

Andrew Bowers — Thu, 08 May 2008 06:54:00 +0000

Announcing Google I/O

Andrew Bowers — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 02:06:00 +0000

By Andrew Bowers, Google Developer Programs

Its been about a year since I last blogged about a big Google developer event. During that time, we’ve seen a number of new technologies emerge which developers can use to build killer web applications. OpenSocial, Gears, and Android are a few that come to mind. But there is also a lot to learn if you really want to get the most out of these products.

That’s why I’m excited to announce Google I/O, a two day developer gathering on May 28th & 29th in San Francisco. The purpose of the event is to bring developers together to learn about products, tools, and techniques which are moving the web forward as a platform.

We've divided Google I/O into five topic areas: AJAX, APIs & Tools, Social, Geo, and Mobile. There's, of course, a focus on Google products, but the event won’t be limited to just Google APIs and developer tools. There is a lot of knowledge about web development in general at Google, and we’d like to share that expertise so that all applications on the web get better.

Over the two days, Google engineers and other leading software developers will share their knowledge in breakout sessions, hands-on Code Labs, and Q&A Fireside Chats. Just a few of those speakers and what they'll be covering:

David Glazer, Director of Engineering - OpenSocial
Mark Lucovsky, Director of Engineering - AJAX APIs
Brad Fitzpatrick, Software Engineer - Social Graph API
Dion Almaer, Technical Program Manager and co-founder of AJAXian.com - AJAX
John Panzer, Technical Manager - Shindig
Guido Van Rossum, Software Engineer and creator of Python - Python and Google APIs
Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager - Open Source
Bruce Johnson, co-creator of Google Web Toolkit - Google Web Toolkit

We're doing our best to make this a can't-miss event for web app developers. Visit the Google I/O website to learn more and register. Space is limited, so be sure to make plans to attend now.

PS. If you are wondering whether we’re still having our global Google Developer Day series, the answer is a definite yes. We’ll be rolling out Developer Days to a number of countries outside the US. Look for an announcement of dates and locations soon.

Can I please have s’mores

Andrew Bowers — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 05:05:00 +0000

By Andrew Bowers, Google Developer Programs

When Vic asked me to organize a campfire on campus, at first I thought he was joking. But when he kept asking how big the fire was going to be, I quickly realized he wasn't. Thus Campfire One was lit.

Campfire One is a means to share product announcements with lots of people in a way which keeps pace with Google's release cycle. We invite a few people to campus and record our news for the web. There's no Campfire Two, just another Campfire One in the future. The 'One' signals that we've flipped the bit on something we think is worth sharing.

Tonight at Campfire One we were very excited to introduce OpenSocial, a common set of APIs for building social applications across the web. With OpenSocial, developers have less to learn in order to build for multiple websites. There are a number of companies already working on the OpenSocial APIs, including those who presented with us tonight: MySpace, Ning, hi5, iLike, FotoFlexer, RockYou, Slide, Viadeo, Flixster, LinkedIn, Ning, Salesforce, Theikos, and Virtual Tourist. Watch Campfire One from earlier this evening:

By the way, did you know that oak on a campfire is supposed to smoke less than fir? I don't think some of our presenters believe it. You might say we had a bit of a real 'smoke test' before rolling the cameras.

Gears Roadmap and Development Process

Andrew Bowers — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 06:36:00 +0000

Posted by Othman Laraki, Product Manager

It's been a little over a month since Gears launched. In these few weeks, we received great input from the community and been impressed by all the creative uses people have found for Gears. Now that Gears is public, we're moving into a completely open development model. The idea is to do all of our development and team collaboration in the open so that the community can keep updated on what we're doing and easily make contributions. There are a few updates that we'd like share so people know what's we're up to:

Gears Roadmap
Our objective is to efficiently take Gears to a state where it covers the requirements necessary for significant applications using the API on a large scale. This includes integrating the community's feedback on the API and smoothing the rough edges necessary for non-techie consumers to use Gears. To get an idea of what we're focusing on, you can check out the Gears Roadmap. Between now and mid-August we're aiming to deliver on a Cross-Origin API and an Improved Workerpool. Following that, by end of September, we'll be enabling full text search in languages other than English (specifically Japanese, Russian and Arabic). At the same time, we'll be localizing the UI (initial languages will be French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese).

Development Process
Our objective is for all Gears development to be conducted entirely in the open. This is still a work in progress, but we'd like to make it as easy as possible for developers to cut their own builds as well as submit contributions to the project. We made several relevant posts on the Gears Wiki over the last few days:

1) Build Instructions:
Building Gears for Windows
Building Gears for Safari

2) Contributing to Gears document outlines the basics of getting involved with Gears and can serve as an initial guide for contributors.

Community Response to Gears

Andrew Bowers — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 23:44:00 +0000

By Aaron Boodman, Google Gears Engineer and Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

It has been a week and change since we announced Google Gears.

We've been pretty busy responding to initial bugs, but we wanted to take a moment to summarize some of the great discussion and community involvement that has already started happening.

API Abstractions

One thing we've tried to do with Gears is go for evolution over revolution. This is why we have built focused components that you can then build on. We expected that people would build broader abstractions on top of Gears APIs, much as the community has built on top of XMLHttpRequest.

It has already started:

There has been a fair amount of playing with the Database component, and its APIs.

gears-dblib allows you to work with objects/hashes, and wraps a few common patterns. Think selectAll(sql, function(row) {}).
Gears ORM is more about Person.select(), and object-y. I am sure we will see a port of ActiveRecord and Hibernate shortly!
GearShift ports ideas from ActiveRecord Migrations. We need to think about how to evolve the DB over time.

Our own Aaron Boodman has done some experimentation with a convenience wrapper around the Worker Pool API.

Library Integration

We have seen Ajax libraries and frameworks start to support Gears:

Ext JS Gears Integration
SQL Admin for Google Gears
Aflax and Gears
Flex and Google Gears: Christophe Coenraets has published the SalesForce automation tool used in the Gears keynote
Dojo Offline runs on Gears. Brad Neuberg talks about his excitement over Gears, and where he sees things going.

Example Applications

Google Reader was our first example of using Gears to take an application offline.
Remember The Milk quickly outdid us with a very nice offline implementation including seamless background synchronization and full support for almost all their features.
RSS Bling is a quick port of the RSS reader to work offline.
DB Schema Editor is a nice implementation of drag and drop schema editing for Gears.
Google Reader Gears Search adds search to Google Reader using Greasemonkey and the Gears full text search functionality.

Presentations, etc

We talked about Gears at Google Developer Day, and we have the presentations to prove it online at YouTube.

Some people asked if the presentation we used is available anywhere to download, and in fact it is. The presentation is part of the downloadable SDK tools and samples which includes a variety of Gears samples.

We've also had the pleasure of giving some interviews about Gears. Here are a couple you can listen to:

We're all extremely excited to see the early interest in Gears and we're committed to responding to your feedback as quickly as possible and making this a robust and useful toolkit for web applications. Let us know what you think, what's missing, and where we should focus our efforts.