If you don’t know about or use the shareable-prefs API, you can safely stop reading now. If you do, we want to let you know that we’ll be deprecating this API and feature.A little over a year ago, iGoogle added shareable-prefs, enabling gadgets to shar…
If you don’t know about or use the shareable-prefs API, you can safely stop reading now. If you do, we want to let you know that we’ll be deprecating this API and feature.A little over a year ago, iGoogle added shareable-prefs, enabling gadgets to shar…
On the iGoogle team we’re always working to balance the needs of our users with the needs of our developers, to make sure we’re creating an environment where everyone benefits. We want users to have access to the very best gadgets, hence we want to mak…
On the iGoogle team we’re always working to balance the needs of our users with the needs of our developers, to make sure we’re creating an environment where everyone benefits. We want users to have access to the very best gadgets, hence we want to mak…
The legacy gadgets API has had a storied life, as both the first version of the gadgets API that drove iGoogle, and the direct predecessor of the current gadgets.* API. As with many APIs there comes a time when we must say goodbye to the past, and embr…
The legacy gadgets API has had a storied life, as both the first version of the gadgets API that drove iGoogle, and the direct predecessor of the current gadgets.* API. As with many APIs there comes a time when we must say goodbye to the past, and embr…
Users love fast gadgets. Fast gadgets are more likely to remain installed, and will see higher usage. Fast gadgets may also cost less to keep running.Slow gadgets make users unhappy, both with individual gadgets, and with iGoogle. Unfortunately, there …
If you’ve been a devoted reader of this blog you’re probably no stranger to the idea that “social is better” when it comes to the web. Activities such as reading the news, doing a crossword puzzle, sharing a todo list, or watching a video are all bette…
Not so long ago we wrote about the need to keep your social gadgets robust to adversity. We received a lot of questions about how to detect when social conditions have broken down, and what to tell users when they have. So here’s a quick cheatsheet for…
Over the last few days, we’ve introduced several improvements to the sandbox to help flesh out what the full social experience will look like for your users.First, sharing a gadget is a richer experience — requestShareApp invites now display notifica…
Some of you may have noticed that OpenSocial API calls in the sandbox have started returning 401s, regardless of whether or not you’ve enabled social ACLs in your gadget. We’re in the process of changing a few things behind the scenes, one of which has…
Updates are back! As the launch of OpenSocial support for iGoogle draws ever closer, we wanted to give you guys more ability to test and refine your gadget’s use of the activity stream. To that end we encourage you to install the Updates gadget which …
A lot of the content we post on this blog is about social. Social is new, social is big, social is better (all true!) … but, non-social is important too, and gadgets should behave gracefully when users have not enabled social features, or they aren’…
Writing software is hard, and it’s easy for bugs to creep in. Gadgets are no different. And while developing gadgets here at Google, we discovered that many gadget bugs only show up when you’ve finished developing — like when Japanese users can’t se…
In case you haven’t seen the announcement on the OpenSocial blog, some changes to the way iGoogle’s REST and RPC endpoints verify requests will be going live today, on the developer sandbox. If you’re using a client library (Java, PHP, Python, Ruby), t…