Google Data » Mike Marchak

Random Hacks of Kindness #2 – Come hack for humanity!

Mike Marchak — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 17:00:00 +0000

On the weekend of December 4 and 5, hackers will gather in cities around the globe to create software solutions that make a difference.

Google, Microsoft, The World Bank and Yahoo! are inviting software developers, independent hackers and students to participate in Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK #2) next weekend.

RHoK brings together volunteer programmers and experts in disaster response for a two-day hackathon to create software solutions that focus on problems related to disaster risk and response. It is an opportunity to meet and work with top software developers and disaster experts, to create and improve open source applications that enable communities to recover from disasters, and to possibly win prizes.

Examples of previous hacks include the “I’m OK” app from RHoK #0 in November 2009, which was used during the response to recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, and the landslide prediction tool “Chasm,” winner of RHoK #1 in June 2010.

RHOK will be held simultaneously in many locations around the world. The five main stages will be in Chicago, Sao Paolo, Aarhus, Nairobi and Bangalore; and there will be over a dozen satellite events in other global cities. To find a location near you, see the latest list on the RHoK website.

Join us on December 4th and 5th, and visit www.rhok.org for more information.

By Christiaan Adams, Google Crisis Response Team

Edmunds partners with Google to make the web faster

Mike Marchak — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 19:31:00 +0000

Note: This is a guest post from Ismail Elshareef, who is the Principal Architect at Edmunds.com. Thanks for the post and for making the web faster Ismail!

In the Fall of 2008, we embarked on a complete redesign of our car enthusiast site, insideline.com. One of the main redesign objectives was to deliver the fastest page load possible to our consumers. Leading up to that point, we have been closely following and implementing the performance best practices championed by Google's Make the Web Faster team and others. We understood the impact performance has on user experience and the bottom line.

Some of the many performance-enhancing features that have been implemented on insideline.com (and now on our beta.edmunds.com) are:

Reducing the number of HTTP requests: We combined CSS and JavaScript files as necessary as well as using sprites and data URIs when appropriate. We have also reduced the number of blocking requests as much as possible to make the pages "feel" faster
Serving static content from different domains: This helped maximize the browser parallel download capacity and made the request payload faster since no cookies were sent over the wire to those domains
Using Expires headers: Caching static files in the client's browser to eliminate unnecessary, redundant requests to our servers
Lazy-loading Page Modules: Render the bare minimum page components first so that the user sees something on the page, and then go through the modules and load them in order of priority. We developed a JavaScript Loader component to help us accomplish that which you can read more on the Edmunds technology blog.
Managing 3rd-party components: iFrame components could be lazy-loaded without a problem. JavaScript components, on the other hand, need to be loaded onto the page before the onLoad event fires. That had the potential of slowing down our pages. The solution we devised was to delay the calling of those components until we initiate the lazy-loading of modules and right before the onLoad event fires
Using non-blocking calls: With the browser being a single thread process, we optimized ways of including resources on the page without affecting page rendering so that the page is perceived to be fast by the user.

The results on insideline.com have been incredbile. Page load time went from 9 seconds on average on the old site to 1.5 seconds on average on the new one, and that's with loading in much richer content onto the page (measured with WebPageTest). We have also seen a 3% increase in ad revenue. On the beta.edmunds.com, which will replace our legacy site fully in December 2010, we have seen a 17% increase in page views and a 2% reduction in the bounce rate for our landing pages in a controlled experiment.

Although we have a long way to go in making our pages and services faster, we are very pleased of the progress we’ve made so far. Working with Google to make the web faster has been an exciting adventure that will continue with more improvements and innovations for both our sites and the web as a whole. Get more details on the Edmunds technology blog and try these enhancements on your site today.

By Ismail Elshareef, Principal Architect, Edmunds.com

Simpler Access to Flickr for Google Users with OpenID

Mike Marchak — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 21:15:00 +0000

OpenID momentum continues to grow. Yahoo! announced that Google users can now sign up for a new account on Flickr’s photo-sharing service with their Google Account information, eliminating the need to create a new username and password. Flickr joins other websites such as Plaxo and Facebook that also support this simpler registration process for Google users.

Google and Yahoo! are two of the many companies who have been involved with the OpenID community’s efforts to improve the process for how users log in and sign up for online services. For example, last month Google announced its use of OpenID to make it simpler for Yahoo! users to sign up for Google services.

While Google doesn’t yet support the use of OpenID for replacing passwords on its own sites, we’re involved in the OpenID community’s efforts to research how to best implement that type of support. Yahoo!’s announcement today is another step in defining those best practices. We look forward to discussing this new feature at next week’s Internet Identity Workshop where the identity community gathers to discuss how to further accelerate the adoption of standards like OpenID.

By Eric Sachs, Internet Identity Team

Python Library for Google Analytics Management API

Mike Marchak — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 22:57:00 +0000

It’s been only 7 weeks since we’ve launched the Google Analytics Management API and we’ve heard a lot of great feedback. Thanks!

Since Python is one of our more popular languages, we’ve updated the Google Analytics Python Client Library to access all 5 feeds of the Management API. Now it’s easier than ever to get your configuration data from the API.

To show you how simple it is to use the library, here is an example which returns all the goal names for a profile:

import gdata.analytics.client

APP_NAME = 'goal_names_demo'
my_client = gdata.analytics.client.AnalyticsClient(source=APP_NAME)

# Authorize
my_client.client_login(
    INSERT_USER_NAME,
    INSERT_PASSWORD,
    APP_NAME,
    service='analytics')

# Make a query.
query = gdata.analytics.client.GoalQuery(
      acct_id='INSERT_ACCOUNT_ID',
      web_prop_id='INSERT_WEB_PROP_ID',
      profile_id='INSERT_PROFILE_ID')

# Get and print results.
results = my_client.GetManagementFeed(query)
for entry in results.entry:
  print 'Goal number = %s' % entry.goal.number
  print 'Goal name   = %s' % entry.goal.name
  print 'Goal value  = %s' % entry.goal.value

To get you started, we wrote a reference example which accesses all the important information for each feed. We also added links to the source and PyDoc from the Management API Libraries and Examples page. Have a look and let us know what you think!

By Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

SVG documents searchable on Google

Mike Marchak — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:13:00 +0000

Just a heads up that it should now be easier for users to find SVG files when searching on Google. That’s right, we’ve expanded our indexing capabilities to include SVG. Feel free to check out our Webmaster Help Center for the complete list of file types we support, and our Webmaster Blog for more information on our SVG announcement.

By Maile Ohye, Google Developer Relations

A developer preview for the Chrome Web Store

Mike Marchak — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:15:00 +0000

Today, we released a developer preview of the Chrome Web Store. Besides brand new documentation, we now allow developers to upload their apps using the developer registration flow of the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery.

The Chrome Web Store will be launching later this year. In the meantime, we’ll continue to share news on apps and the store through blog posts on the Chromium and Google Code blogs. We also encourage you to join our discussion group for apps for updates on our efforts.

By Rahul Roy-chowdhury, Google Chrome Team

CSS3 Transitions and Transforms in Gmail for the iPad

Mike Marchak — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 22:30:00 +0000

The Mobile Gmail team recently announced a new stacked cards interface for the iPad. In this interface we make use of CSS3 transitions and transforms to provide a more intuitive interface that has a look and feel that is similar to native applications. In this post we will describe CSS3 transitions and transforms and how they were used to develop this interface. All of the CSS and JavaScript examples currently work only in WebKit-based browsers, such as Safari on the iPad. However, Mozilla-based browsers have their own versions of WebKit-based extensions that use the ‘-moz’ prefix, and that should behave similarly.

CSS3 Transitions

CSS3 transitions allow the browser to animate the change of a CSS property from an initial value to a final value. A transition is configured by setting four CSS properties on an HTML element:

-webkit-transition-property
-webkit-transition-duration
-webkit-transition-timing-function
-webkit-transition-delay

The -webkit-transition-property property identifies the CSS properties where changes to the property will trigger a transition between the old value of the property and the new value. The -webkit-transition-duration property specifies, in milliseconds, the length of time over which the transition should take place. The -webkit-transition-timing-function property describes the speed at which the transition progresses over the duration of the transition. For example, -webkit-transition-timing-function: ease-in-out describes a transition that will proceed slowly at the beginning and the end of the transition, but that will proceed quickly during the middle of the transition. You can also provide a custom, cubic-bezier function for a higher degree of control over the timing. The -webkit-transition-delay property specifies a delay, measured in milliseconds, before the transition begins.

The transition properties can also be set simultaneously using the -webkit-transition property, by simply specifying them in the above order. Once the transitions properties are set and up to the point where the value of -webkit-transition-property is changed, all modifications of the specified CSS properties will trigger transitions.

CSS3 Transforms

CSS3 transforms allow the rendering of an HTML element to be modified using 2D and 3D transformations such as rotation, scaling, and translations. Transforms are applied by setting the -webkit-transform CSS property with the desired list of transforms. Each transform takes the form of a transformation function, such as translate3d or rotate, and a list of parameters enclosed in brackets. For example, to move an object to the right by 100 pixels and rotate it by 45 degrees you can use the -webkit-transform property:

-webkit-transform: translate(100px, 0) rotate(45deg);

Using -webkit-transform as the transition property when moving an element is advantageous relative to using the standard top and left properties because transitions using -webkit-transform are hardware-accelerated in Safari. An exception here is that it seems that 2D translations are not hardware-accelerated. But, since any 2D translation is equivalent to a corresponding 3D translation with the same translations in the x and y and no translation in the z axis, it is easy to use a hardware accelerated translate3d(x, y, 0) transform instead of a non-hardware accelerated translate(x, y) transform.

Terminology

There are a few terms here that begin with ‘trans,’ and they can easily be confused if you are not familiar with them. Here they are again:

Transition: An implicit animation of CSS properties between an initial and a final value.
Transform: A modification to the appearance of an HTML element by manipulating it in a 2D or 3D space.
Translation: A particular type of transformation that moves the HTML element in 2D or 3D space.

Stacked Cards Interface

In the stacked cards interface, cards representing selected conversations transition onto the screen when their corresponding conversation is selected, and transition off of the screen when it is deselected.

When cards are selected, they are transitioned out from underneath the conversation list on the left side of the application into the selected conversation area on the right side of the application. To move the card onto the screen, we set an initial transform, configure the transition, and finally apply the desired final transform to the element.

To simplify the layout, the un-transformed position of each card is its normal position in the selected conversation area. This allows the card to have no translation applied when in this position, although it will need a translation to animate the movement. Initially the card has a transform that translates it to the left. The z-index property is used to ensure that the card will render underneath the conversation list. The rotation of the card is also initially applied, since we chose not to have the card rotate as it transitions onto the screen.

card.style.WebkitTransform =
‘translate3d(-700px, 0, 0) rotate(5deg)’;

Since the particular translation and rotation can vary, we chose to apply this property using JavaScript rather than including it in the CSS class applied to the card. It is important that the CSS3 transition is not yet applied because we do not want this transform to be a transition. Moreover, it is important that the card is rendered at its initial transform before the transition is configured and the destination transform is applied. This is easily achieved by wrapping these next steps in a call to window.setTimeout with a timeout of 0 ms.

window.setTimeout(function() {
  card.style.WebkitTransition =
    ‘-webkit-transform 300ms ease-in-out’;
  card.style.WebkitTransform = 
    ‘translate3d(0, 0, 0) rotate(5deg)’; 
}, 0);

Completion of the Transition

It is useful to know when the transition is complete. In the stacked cards interface, we use this to improve performance by setting display:none on obscured cards so that they do not need to be rendered. Adding an event listener allows the application to be notified when the transition has completed.

element.addEventListener(‘webkitTransitionEnd’, listener, false);

Interrupting a Transition

In some cases, you may want to change a transition while it is in progress. For example, if the user unselected a conversation while the corresponding card was still animating onto the screen, we might apply a new transition to send the card back off of the screen again. When you apply a new CSS value while a transition is already in progress, a new transition will occur between the current value of the property in the transition and the new value that you apply. For example, suppose a card is halfway through it’s transition onto the screen, and we apply this CSS transform:

card.style.WebkitTransform = 
   ‘translate3d(-700px, 0, 0) rotate(5deg)’;

Since the transition properties are still configured, a new transition will occur. The initial value for the transition will be the halfway point - approximately translated3d(-350px, 0, 0) rotate(5deg). The final value will be translate3d(-700px, 0, 0) rotate(5deg). The full duration of the transition will still apply, so the card will move about half as quickly as it usually does. It is possible to determine the current transform applied to an HTML element using the WebKitCSSMatrix and to use this to recalculate more appropriate transition parameters, but this is outside the scope of this post.

Conclusion
I hope that this introduction to CSS3 transitions and transforms has been useful, and that the insight into the implementation of Mobile Gmail on the iPad has been interesting. Based on positive feedback, the Mobile Gmail team is looking forward to making more use of transitions and transforms in the future.

By Liam Asher Segel-Brown, Software Engineering Intern, Google Mobile

HTML5: Still Rocking!

Mike Marchak — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 21:36:00 +0000

As announced on the chromium.org blog, we’ve just pushed a bunch of new content to our HTML5Rocks.com developer site, which launched earlier this summer.

Anyone that’s following HTML5 knows how fast things are moving! To keep you informed with all of the amazing features landing in today’s browsers, we’ve added five new articles, a heap of new resources, and a much needed RSS feed for staying tuned in. We're also revealing a new component of the site, the HTML5 Studio. It’s a collection of standalone demos that highlight hot, new HTML5 features working together.

If you'd like to contribute code, guides, or samples, we’re working on a third-party contributors guide. Please stay tuned! In the meantime, you can get in touch with us on the bug tracker or via @ChromiumDev.

By Eric Bidelman, Google Chrome Developer Relations

New Google Buzz API features, including a garden hose

Mike Marchak — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 21:00:00 +0000

It’s been less than a month since our last launch, but we couldn’t sit still so today we’re announcing three new features. We think these will help developers create deeper, more engaging user experiences.

First, we wanted to make the firehose experience available to those who didn’t have the required server resources to support that amount of traffic. So we built a “garden hose” that’s a random sampling of public Google Buzz posts with a query rate that’ll come under the free quota limit for Google App Engine. As such, many more developers will be able to easily get their hands dirty on this great source of real-time data.

Second, we’ve created an API to return the people associated with a particular activity query. That is, you can now search for people who have recently created a public post that includes an arbitrary string or related geo-location. For example, if you wanted to see the people associated with Red Sox near Fenway Park, you could use this URL for the JSON response.

Third, we now enable users to discover and explore content related to a particular post. With this new API, developers can now access and deliver Google search results related to the topic of that post. For example, given this post about Coworking Day, you could add ‘/@related’ to the end of the self link to get this JSON response of related links. Cool, huh?

As always, these features are documented in more detail on the Google Buzz API documentation site. Please swing by the the Developer Forum and let us know what you think!

By Eric Steinlauf, Google Buzz Team

Photo credit: Nandhp, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

New Google Font Previewer – Webfonts Easier and More Fun

Mike Marchak — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:45:00 +0000

We’re very proud to tell you that we’ve just launched a new feature for the Google font directory. The new Google font previewer lets you test drive all the fonts in the directory so you can decide which web font in the Google Font API works best for your requirements.

Now, whenever you visit the font family page of any of the fonts, you will see a link saying “Preview this font” that will load your font selection into the font previewer.

Here you can edit the text, change its size and line height, and add decorations and spacing among other things. You can even apply text shadow to your text.

The previewer will generate the corresponding code for you so all you have to do to start using the font on your own website is to copy and paste the stylesheet link and the CSS into your pages. In the example above this would be:


rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" >

That’s really all you need to use the Google Font API.

If you want to see the font sample without any distractions from the font previewer controls, you can do that as well simply by clicking “Toggle controls” in the upper right corner. This will show you a nice clean example of what the font would look like in your design.

We think the previewer is a great way to try out web fonts and showcase what can be done with them. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think about the new font previewer.

By Marc Tobias Kunisch, Google Font API team

Redesigned app pages on orkut

Mike Marchak — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Since we launched the new orkut, we’ve been working hard to launch new features and introduce the new design to other pages that are still using the older UI. Today, we’re excited to announce the redesign of the app pages on orkut. Because we want developers to try it out first, these changes are first being rolled out to the sandbox, and you’ll have some time to give us your feedback before these go live for all users at orkut.com. We believe usability and speed improved considerably.

Let’s check out what’s new:

New canvas page
Options are more descriptive and appear at the top of the page. They open up as dialogs so users can configure or access the app information without leaving the canvas page.

New apps directory page
The apps directory is easier to navigate. We removed the descriptions and arranged the apps in two columns, and you can search for apps within categories, so it all looks much cleaner. We also created a section called "my applications" from where users can open or remove their apps.

When a user clicks on an app listed in the directory, the screenshot as well as the app’s description and popularity will now pop up in a new window. This window replaces the old app page and allows users to quickly add apps without loading another page.

New profile view for apps
We’re changing the way apps are displayed on a user’s profile. Showing several apps in tabs on the profile page was confusing. We made things simpler having users select a single app to appear on their profile page and other apps (as well as the "about me" section) are accessible by a drop-down menu.

A new apps box
We’re adding a “my applications” box, just below the “my communities” one on the right. This box will list the thumbnails of all apps the user has installed. We hope this will drive more traffic to the app’s canvas page.

We hope you’ll like these changes. Please share your feedback with us at the forum.

By Adler Silva, orkut Team

New Google Buzz API features, including a hose of fire

Mike Marchak — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 21:30:00 +0000

Since we introduced the Google Buzz API at Google I/O, we’ve been working hard to make it better, broader, and more useful. Today we're introducing several new features that are the direct result of your feedback.

We're launching the Google Buzz firehose — our top developer feature request. With the firehose, all public activities are available as they are published with a single subscription, thanks to syndication via PubSubHubbub.

We’ve had some fun coming up with cool things to do with the firehose. For example, Bob Aman coded up Buzz Mood, an App Engine app inspired by Twistori. By scanning for posts that contain certain keywords, Bob’s able to give us a sense for the mood across all of Google Buzz in real time. Definitely take a look at the the source to get ideas for your own apps!

For more inspiration, also check out our firehose launch partners. Integrating with the firehose today are Collecta, Gnip, OneRiot, Postrank Analytics, and Superfeedr’s Track.

We’re making these new API features available starting today:

Comments by the user - This feed consists of the activities the user has commented on.
Likes by the user - The activities the user has liked are in this feed.
Shared counts - This will return the number of times a specified URL has been shared across Google Buzz.

All of these features are documented in much more detail on the Google Buzz API documentation site and can be discussed on the Developer Forum. We will continue to innovate and iterate the Buzz API and encourage you to check out the new features and let us know what you think.

By John Panzer, Google Buzz Team

.NET Data API SDK updated

Mike Marchak — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:26:00 +0000

We are proud to announce a new release of the Google Data API .NET SDK.

This new release, version 1.6, adds support for the latest Contacts and Documents services, as well as support for Google Analytics. It also sports a very easy to use ResumableUpload component to support those gigantic YouTube Videos that you are dying to upload, as well as other services that support this feature, like Google Documents.

For a complete list of changes and bugfixes: http://google-gdata.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/clients/cs/RELEASE_NOTES.HTML

To download this release: http://code.google.com/p/google-gdata/downloads/list
(it comes in versions for Windows, Mono and Windows Mobile).

If you want to report bugs or request features: http://code.google.com/p/google-gdata/issues/list

Happy coding

By Frank Mantek, Google Developer Team

Orkut App Issues Being Addressed

Mike Marchak — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 19:54:00 +0000

The Orkut engineering team has been hard at work addressing some recent issues and we would like to provide a status update and apologize for the inconvenience our spotty service may have caused you. We’re not done yet, but we wanted to explain to you what happened and what corrective measures we’re taking to ensure it doesn’t happen again:

First, Orkut is based on open source software that is subject to frequent updates, which we then pull and merge into the Orkut code tree. A result is that this can sometimes makes bugs harder to discover and fix. We accidentally began overwriting user app preferences, which resulted in the activity updates not getting posted, but this has now been fixed.

Another unexpected effect was that getting viewer and owner information via data pipelining also became broken, and we’re still working to fix this.

Lastly, we had a problem with our directory listing that led to some featured apps being reported as “being reviewed.” We’ve already identified how to fix this permanently, and the fix should be live in a few days.

Once again, we would like to apologize for these bugs. Thanks to everyone for their patience these past weeks as we’ve focused on fixing these issues, and don’t forget to check this forum thread for status updates.

By Eduardo Thuler, Orkut product manager

WebFont Loader updated with Ascender Module

Mike Marchak — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Two months ago we announced the WebFont Loader, a JavaScript library for improving the web font experience. Today we are pleased to announce the availability of the Ascender Module, so now you can use the WebFont Loader with Ascender’s FontsLive web font service.

The WebFont Loader was designed to make it easy to switch between different providers of web fonts, including Google, Typekit, and others. The Ascender module provides users of the FontsLive service with enhanced controls over how web fonts are handled by various browsers.

The WebFont Loader provides developers with advanced features to manage how web fonts behave, establish better consistency across all browsers and even set the fallback font size to more closely match the web font, so content doesn't reflow after loading.

Google is delighted to work with the Ascender and DevBridge teams on this new module for the WebFont Loader. We look forward to continue to advance typography on the web.

By Jeremie Lenfant-Engelmann, Google Font API team

Page Speed for ads and trackers

Mike Marchak — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:05:00 +0000

At Google, we're passionate about making the web faster. To help web page owners optimize their pages for speed, we open-sourced the Page Speed web performance tool a year ago. Today, we're excited to launch a new Page Speed feature: Page Speed for ads, such as display and rich media ads, and trackers, also known as analytics.

Page Speed now enables developers to run a performance analysis of the ads, the trackers, or the remaining content of the page. Web developers can use Page Speed to determine how ads and trackers impact the performance of their web pages, and ad and tracker providers can use this feature to tune their services for speed.

For instance, when analyzing an example web page, Page Speed displays several suggestions that we can apply to make the page faster:

But which of these suggestions applies to the content on the page that we authored? Which apply to the ads and trackers? Using the "Analyze"menu, we can determine that, in this example, the ads are contributing to slowing down the page:

When we switch to analyze the content of the page, the score for the page improves to 93. We can in this case enable compression for the resource that is served uncompressed currently.

We hope that you try these and other new features and rules of Page Speed and find them useful to further optimize the speed of your web pages.

Please share your experience using this new feature in our discussion forum.

By Bryan McQuade, Page Speed team

Google Hackfest and Reception at RailsConf

Mike Marchak — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 23:15:00 +0000

Many of the developer and enterprise products presented at Google I/O are of great interest to the Rails Community. We know developers attending RailsConf are ready to roll up their sleeves to start hacking, so Google is hosting a hackfest and reception at the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel in Maryland DF (5th Floor). The event will be on June 9th from 7:00pm to 11:30pm, and of course we'll have food, beer and swag. Space is limited, so please register now, we'll send out an email when your registration has been confirmed.

Steven Bazyl will be helping folks integrate their existing Rails apps into Google Apps Marketplace using OpenID, OAuth, and the Google Data APIs. The Google Apps Marketplace offers products and services designed for Google users, including installable apps that integrate with Google Apps.

Ryan Brown and John Woodell will be getting folks setup with Duby or JRuby on App Engine, and David Masover will be helping folks with the DataMapper adapter. Google App Engine enables developers to build and host web apps on the same systems that power Google applications. JVM languages like Duby and JRuby operate on App Engine for Java.

Seth Ladd will be available to talk about the Chrome Web Store. The Chrome Web Store a very easy way to distribute and monetize apps written in HTML, HTML5, or even Flash. The Chrome Web Store is a perfect way to market and distribute your Rails application, run that app on any platform or device (mobile or desktop), sign up users, and make money.

Seth will also be running two surveys at the conference, and would love your feedback on HTML5 and the Chrome Web Store. These in-person surveys are to help him gauge developer interest and knowledge in these technologies. To entice participants, he will have lots of t-shirts on hand to give away to attendees at the conference who participates in the survey. Look for him while at the conference, let him know your thoughts, and collect your t-shirt (while supplies last).

RailsConf attendees that sign up for the hackfest by June 8th, can request a Google Storage account to use at the hackfest. Google Storage for Developers a RESTful service for storing and accessing your data on Google's infrastructure. The service combines the performance and scalability of Google's cloud with advanced security and sharing capabilities.

We're looking forward to the great talks and to meeting lots of developers. Can't wait to do some coding with you at RailsConf 2010!

By Seth Ladd, Chrome Developer Relations Team

I/O Recap: The open web moves forward, Froyo delights developers and TV meets Web

Mike Marchak — Thu, 20 May 2010 23:49:00 +0000

With over 5,000 developers, more than 90 sessions, over 180 companies in the Sandbox and a steady stream of major announcements, it’s been a busy two days at Google I/O here in San Francisco. For us, the best part of I/O was getting to meet and talk with developers and see all the amazing things you’re building. Getting to drive the Mondo Spider at the after party was pretty awesome too!

Vic Gundotra kicked off the Day 1 keynote which featured the future of the web with HTML5, WebM, the Chrome Web Store, Google App Engine for Business and much, much more. Read the full Day 1 keynote recap here or watch the full length video below:

Day 2 kicked off early with a keynote featuring Android 2.2 (code name: Froyo), sneak peeks into the future of Android, mobile app monetization, and the official announcement of Google TV. Here is the Android part of the Day 2 keynote, and we will update this post later when the Google TV segment is ready. (UPDATE: You can find the Google TV segment here.)

Many teams prepare their products to announce at Google I/O, so there were lots of announcements beyond the keynotes as well, including

We have been blogging and tweeting non-stop, so feel free to read up on all the exciting new launches on our Code blog and @googleio Twitter feed.

To see live notes of the keynotes, see Matt Cutts’ Day 1 live wave and Day 2 live buzz. For live notes of all sessions, see the embedded waves on our session pages or go to the main Google I/O wave. Videos from all the I/O sessions will be posted soon to the Google Developers Channel on YouTube.

We’ll end with a photo slide show of some of our favorite moments from I/O:

Thanks to everyone for making the last couple of days so much fun! Hope to see you next year.

Susan Taing and Mike Marchak, Google Developer team

With the New Google Latitude API, Build Latitude and Location Into Your App

Mike Marchak — Wed, 19 May 2010 19:00:00 +0000

Location, location, location. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re really excited about all the ways location can make mobile apps and websites more useful. With Google Latitude, we created a simple way to share your location with whomever you like, display it wherever you like, and even keep a history of it if you want. We wanted to give you even more ways to use your location, so today we’re announcing the Google Latitude API -- an easy and safe way to build Latitude and location into any apps or features that you could possibly imagine!

Since launching Latitude, our team has been talking about all the cool things you could do with your continuously updated Latitude location. While we’ve built some of our ideas, there are simply too many exciting ones for us to do alone. Instead, we wanted to let developers create apps that do even more with Latitude and location. You could, for example, build apps or features for:

Thermostats that turn on and off automatically when you’re driving towards or away from home.
Traffic that send alerts if there’s heavy traffic ahead of you or on a route you usually take based on your location history.
Your credit card accounts to alert you of potential fraud when a purchase is made far from where you actually are.
Photo albums so your vacation photos appear on a map at all the places you visited based on your location history.

We want to help developers build all these applications and more, but our first priority is privacy and making sure we give users control over their location. That way, it’s only used when, where, and how users choose. When you request access to Latitude users’ data, users will have to specifically grant access to your domain after seeing exactly what data is being requested. You may request to update and view users’ best available location, view only their city-level location, and/or update and view their location history if they’ve opted in to using Google Location History. Users will also be able to revoke access from any developer at any time from their Google Account’s personal settings. Just like with Latitude, the user always chooses who can see their location.

We’ve also learned that making a phone’s continuous location available in the background is tricky to do accurately and efficiently -- just imagine your phone’s battery life if several apps were continuously getting your location in different ways. With this in mind, we wanted to build a free and open Latitude API that lets you just start using your users’ updated locations in new ways without reinventing the wheel.

To get started, go to http://code.google.com/apis/latitude to read our API documentation. Then, join the Latitude API Google Group to ask questions, discuss the API with the community, and give us feedback. The Latitude API is being launched in Labs so we can listen to developer feedback before it graduates. We’re excited to see what you can do with Latitude and location so please let us know what you think!

By Ana Ulin, Software Engineer, Google Mobile Team

Introducing the WebFont Loader in Collaboration with Typekit

Mike Marchak — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:20:00 +0000

Moments ago we introduced the Google Font API and Google Font Directory. In addition to Google’s support of web fonts, we’re excited to announce a second launch: a collaboration with Typekit to open source the WebFont Loader, a JavaScript library for improving the web font experience..

Google and Typekit believe that web fonts, in conjunction with the richer text styling offered by CSS3 and HTML5, provide the visual richness and high fidelity control of print typography while remaining accessible to machines and devices.

There are still some challenges when using web fonts, and the launch of an open source WebFont Loader addresses one of these difficulties: different browsers treat the download of web fonts differently. For example, Firefox will initially render a website’s text in the site’s fallback font until the web font is downloaded, and then the text will be re-rendered and re-flowed using the downloaded web font. Chrome and Safari won’t display the text until the web font is fully downloaded, and Internet Explorer sometimes won’t render any content at all until the web font is available.

The WebFont Loader puts the developer in control of how web fonts are handled by various browsers. The API fires JavaScript events at certain points, for example when the web font completes downloading. With these events, developers can control how web fonts behave on a site so that they download consistently across all browsers. In addition, developers can set the fallback font's size to more closely match the web font, so content doesn't reflow after loading.

Furthermore, the WebFont Loader is designed to make it easy to switch between different providers of web fonts, including Google, Typekit, and others. The code is modular, and we expect to add modules for other major web font providers in coming weeks.

Google is excited to work with Typekit to further web font technology. We look forward to working with others as well to continue to advance typography on the web.

By Jeremie Lenfant-Engelmann, Google Font API team

Enabling Cloud Portability with Google App Engine for Business and VMware

Mike Marchak — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:12:00 +0000

Today we announced Google App Engine for Business, with a host of new features to help enterprises run their business applications on Google’s infrastructure (read our blog post to learn more). We’re also excited to announce our work with VMware to connect our developer tools, making it possible to create rich, multi-device web applications that can be hosted in a variety of Java-compatible hosting environments. Call it cloud portability for the enterprise -- productively build apps that you can deploy onto Google App Engine for Business, a VMware environment (your vSphere infrastructure, your choice of vCloud partners, or VMforce), or other infrastructure such as Amazon EC2.

As part of this announcement, we’re providing early access to these tools -- you can start using them right now by downloading the latest milestone version of VMware’s SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). If you prefer to wait for the general release, you can sign up to be notified.

Spring Roo
With Spring Roo, a next-generation rapid application development tool, Java developers can easily build full applications in minutes, using the Java Persistence API (JPA) to connect to new or existing databases. Roo outputs standard Java code, so it’s easy to refine the back end with the SpringSource Tool Suite and the front end with the Google Web Toolkit SDK, using Roo as much or as little as desired.

Google Web Toolkit SDK
New data presentation widgets in Google Web Toolkit speed development of traditional enterprise applications, increase performance and interactivity for enterprise users, and make it much easier to create engaging mobile apps with a fraction of the investment previously required.

SpringSource Tool Suite
Using the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite, developers can now choose to deploy their application in their current VMware vSphere environment, in VMware vCloud, directly to Google App Engine for Business, or elsewhere. We call this cloud portability.

Google Web Toolkit Speed Tracer
Speed Tracer now helps developers identify and fix performance problems not only in the client and network portions of their apps, but also on the server. By incorporating server-side time traces from both Spring Insight and Google App Engine AppStats, Speed Tracer provides a consolidated view of where sluggishness actually comes from -- be it client, network, or server -- so it’s much easier to see what to fix.

If you’re building business apps, we hope you’ll find these tools make it easier and more fun to get your job done. Maybe you’ll save time and money by developing and testing apps on App Engine, and then deploying to your VMware environment. Maybe you’ll run a second instance of your apps on App Engine for disaster recovery. Or, maybe you’ll take your existing on-premise apps and extend them to the web and to mobile devices in a fraction of the time it might have otherwise taken. The point is, whatever you decide, you can be confident that it’s possible, and that you’re not locked in.

We’re happy to be working with VMware to bring increased interoperability, portability and choice to enterprise developers. We invite you to download the latest milestone version of STS and try these tools for yourself.

By Bruce Johnson, Google Developer team

Introducing the Google Font API & Google Font Directory

Mike Marchak — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:05:00 +0000

Today we are excited to announce a collection of high quality open source web fonts in the Google Font Directory, and the Google Font API to make them available to everybody on the web. For a long time, the web has lagged print and even other electronic media in typographic sophistication. To enjoy the visual richness of diverse fonts, webmasters have resorted to workarounds such as baking text into images. Thanks to browser support for web fonts, this is rapidly changing. Web fonts, enabled by the CSS3 @font-face standard, are hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed.

Google has been working with a number of talented font designers to produce a varied collection of high quality open source fonts for the Google Font Directory. With the Google Font API, using these fonts on your web page is almost as easy as using the standard set of so-called “web-safe” fonts that come installed on most computers.

The Google Font API provides a simple, cross-browser method for using any font in the Google Font Directory on your web page. The fonts have all the advantages of normal text: in addition to being richer visually, text styled in web fonts is still searchable, scales crisply when zoomed, and is accessible to users using screen readers.

Getting started using the Google Font API is easy. Just add a couple lines of HTML:



body { font-family: 'Tangerine', serif; }

The Google Font API hides a lot of complexity behind the scenes. Google’s serving infrastructure takes care of converting the font into a format compatible with any modern browser (including Internet Explorer 6 and up), sends just the styles and weights you select, and the font files and CSS are tuned and optimized for web serving. For example, cache headers are set to maximize the likelihood that the fonts will be served from the browser’s cache with no need for a network roundtrip, even when the same font is linked from different websites.

These fonts also work well with CSS3 and HTML5 styling, including drop shadows, rotation, etc. In addition, selecting these fonts in your CSS works just the same as for locally installed fonts, facilitating clean separation of content and presentation.

The fonts in the Google Font Directory come from a diverse array of designers, including open source developers and highly regarded type designers, and also include the highly acclaimed Droid Sans and Droid Serif fonts, designed by Ascender Corporation as a custom font for Android. We invite you to browse through the directory and get to know the fonts and designers better. Since all the fonts are open source, you can use them any way you like. We also have a separate project hosted on Google Code for downloading the original font files. Since they’re open source, they can be used for just about any purpose, including for print.

We’re hoping designers will contribute many more fonts in coming months to the Google Font Directory. If you’re a designer and are interested in contributing your font, get in touch with us by completing this form.

To showcase the Google Font API, Smashing Magazine has relaunched their site using the open source Droid font hosted by Google. We’re excited about the potential for integrating the Google Font API into many types of publications and web applications. For example, the new themes for Google Spreadsheet forms are a great example of a rich visual experience using web fonts.

This is just the beginning for web fonts. Today, we’re only supporting Western European languages (Latin-1), and we expect to support a number of diverse languages shortly.

By Raph Levien & David Kuettel, Google Font API team

Announcing Google App Engine for Business

Mike Marchak — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:00:00 +0000

We launched Google App Engine two years ago to enable application developers to rapidly build and scale their apps on Google’s infrastructure, without having to worry about maintaining their own servers. Today, we’re excited to bring this platform to IT departments, with the announcement of Google App Engine for Business. Google App Engine for Business lets organizations build and maintain their applications on the same scalable architecture that powers Google applications, with added management and support features tailored specifically for the enterprise.

Google App Engine for Business introduces a number of new features that our enterprise customers have been asking for, including:

Centralized administration: A new, company-focused administration console lets you manage all the applications in your domain.
Reliability and support: 99.9% uptime service level agreement, with premium developer support available.
Secure by default: Only users from your Google Apps domain can access applications and your security policies are enforced on every app.
Pricing that makes sense: Each application costs just $8 per user, per month up to a maximum of $1000 a month. Pay only for what you use.
Enterprise features: Coming later this year, hosted SQL databases, SSL on your company’s domain for secure communications, and access to advanced Google services.

With these new features, we’re making it easier for businesses to take advantage of the core benefits of Google App Engine: easy development using languages you already know (Java and Python); simple administration, with no need to worry about hardware, patches or backups; and effortless scalability, automatically getting the capacity you need when you need it.

Google App Engine for Business is currently in preview, opened to a limited number of enterprises. Learn more about how you can participate, and check our roadmap to follow features as they become available.

By Sean Lynch, Google App Engine team

Announcing Google Moderator’s API, powering a Wave Extension and Android App

Mike Marchak — Tue, 11 May 2010 23:52:00 +0000

Google Moderator is used extensively within Google for meetings and to collect feedback from Googlers on events or happenings within the company. It is also used at conferences and other events to organize and draw upon the collective wisdom of the participants.

Many users have asked us for a formal API, and today, we’re excited to announce the Google Moderator API. You can use the API to access, update, and participate in Google Moderator from custom interfaces.

Here's a quick look at what you can do with Google Moderator’s API:

Create: You can create new series, topics, submissions, or votes on behalf of the currently authenticated user.

Vote: You can allow authenticated users to vote on submissions, or to review their own votes on submissions in a series.

Discover: You can retrieve topics in a series, or submissions in a particular topic or series. You can also track the current aggregate status of votes.

Here are some projects that are using the API today:

Rajiv Bammi whipped up a gadget for Google Wave that will be at Google I/O to allow attendees to ask questions:

http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/wave.html

Jim Blackler, a Google software engineer, spent some of his 20% time to build Google Moderator for Android, an open source project.

When Moderator was used by the White House, we used the Maps API to plot on a map where submissions were coming from:

We’re curious to see what you build, and we’re eager to get your feedback on new features. To get started, check out the documentation and join our Google Group!

By Colby Ranger, Google Moderator Team

Google acquires Labpixies

Mike Marchak — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 05:50:00 +0000

Not everyone likes to start their day with just a search box and logo (no matter how cool it is!). Many users want email, videos, news, weather, games, and other information to be at their fingertips each time they open up a browser window. We launched iGoogle in 2005 to address this need by providing a truly personalized homepage with access to any RSS feed and well over a hundred thousand gadgets.

One of the first developers to create gadgets for iGoogle was Labpixies. Over the years, we worked closely together on a variety of projects, including the launch of a number of global OpenSocial based gadgets. Recently, we decided that we could do more if we were part of the same team, and as such, we're thrilled to announce the acquisition of Labpixies.

The team will be based in our ever-growing Tel Aviv office and will anchor our iGoogle efforts across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. We are looking forward to working with Labpixies to develop great web apps and leverage their knowledge and expertise to help developers and improve the ecosystem overall.

In the meantime, have fun trying to beat me at Flood-It!

By Don Loeb, iGoogle Team

Google Buzz buttons for your site

Mike Marchak — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:08:00 +0000

If you’ve thought about adding Google Buzz buttons to your site, but didn’t want to have to hack together something the way Mashable and TechCrunch did, you’re in luck. Starting today you can grab official Buzz buttons from buzz.google.com/stuff.

From there, you can do some basic customization of the buttons, including specifying the content that will be included when users post. When you configure the URL option for your button, we’ll use that URL to include a preview of the page based on its title and meta description tags. If you don’t specify a link, we’ll take our best guess by including the page on which you placed the button. Likewise, when you set up an image URL, we’ll add a thumbnail of that image to the post your users create. If you prefer to set up your buttons by hand, these options and more are also available through our JavaScript API -- for more details, check out our spec.

By Alison Cichowlas, Software Engineer

Google Code Jam Returns!

Mike Marchak — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 20:00:00 +0000

Given a list of cell phone towers, the cost or gain of upgrading each one, and the requirement that every upgraded tower can only have upgraded towers in its range, can you find the most profitable set of towers to upgrade?

Caught your attention? Then we have the competition for you.

We’re thrilled to announce Google’s annual Code Jam competition. Google Code Jam is a programming competition in which professional and student programmers solve complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time. The contest is all-inclusive: Google Code Jam lets you compete in the programming language and development environment of your choice.

And, this year, for the very first time, the final competition will take place in Google’s Dublin office.

Visit http://code.google.com/codejam to register now and get up to speed on the rules. You can also practice on problems from previous contests. It’s a good idea to check out the competition arena and get comfortable with the interface, competition format and types of problems that you’ll encounter in the contest (http://code.google.com/codejam/archive.html).

The qualification round starts on May 7th, 2010 and after four rounds of online competition, the top 25 competitors will be flown to Google's Dublin office to match wits for the $5,000 first prize — and the title of Code Jam champion!

By Igor Naverniouk, Code Jam Team

HTML5 + Quake II

Mike Marchak — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:15:00 +0000

In case you missed it on the Google Web Toolkit Blog, check out this HTML5 port of Quake II. (Yep, that is a browser pushing 30 frames per second)

For more info, read the full post on the GWT Blog.

By Stephanie Liu, Google Developer Team

Happy 5th Birthday Google Code!

Mike Marchak — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:32:00 +0000

How time flies! It was about five years ago that we launched Google Code to the world. When we launched Google Code, we wanted to make code.google.com a great resource where developers could learn about our vision for open source and the open web. We started in 2005 with a handful of our own open source projects, links to just eight APIs and an announcement of the first ever Google Summer of Code, our now-annual program that introduces university students to open source development. By 2006 our API list had grown to 21, in 2007 there were 37, and today our collection of more than 60 APIs receive over four billion hits per day. Check out the changing face of Google Code below -- from 2005, 2007 to the present.

With the meaning of open in mind, Google Code set out to foster best practices in developer documentation, build a community around web and open source development and demonstrate the power of Google technologies. Over the past five years code.google.com has come a long way from eight APIs, maturing into a destination for developers to explore our growing family of APIs and developer products, whether they speed up the web, alleviate cross-browser issues, make hosting web applications easy and scalable or make the web a more social place.

Google Code has also become an interactive place to share ideas. Not only can developers prototype their work in a Code Playground, they can also use Project Hosting on Google Code, a fast, reliable and easy way for developers to host all kinds of open source projects. Today, there are more than 240,000 projects registered, with commits coming in at about 17,000 per day...about 1 every 5 seconds. We also host 800 open source projects of our own, including four projects (Android, Chrome, Chrome OS and GWT) with over a million lines of code each.

It’s been an amazing five years, but there’s still a lot of work ahead. We’re dedicated to helping the developer and open source communities thrive in as many ways as we can. To celebrate our birthday and thank everyone for supporting code.google.com over the years we’re rolling out a new, faster Subversion server, which will double the source code storage for Project Hosting on Google Code from 1GB to 2GB. Happy coding!

By Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager

Open Source Projects – Apply for Google Summer of Code

Mike Marchak — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:08:00 +0000

Google Summer of Code^TM, our flagship program to introduce college students to open source development, opens today. Over the past five years, we've seen more than 3,400 successful students "graduate" from the program, and we're looking forward to welcoming another group of students for our sixth year. We're now accepting applications from open source projects who wish to act as mentoring organizations and will begin accepting applications from students on March 29th. For more details, check out the Google Open Source Blog.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

The Business of Code, The Code of Business

Mike Marchak — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:15:00 +0000

This post is part of the Who's @ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that gives a closer look at developers who'll be speaking or demoing at Google I/O. This post is written by Albert Wenger, partner at Union Square Ventures (and still enjoys writing code!). Albert will be speaking alongside others in venture capital on a panel at Google I/O.

Reading the Google Code blog, it is hard not to marvel at the fundamental transformation that is taking place in the business of code. By the business of code, I mean the economics of developing and selling software. My first exposure to the software business was as a teenager in Germany some twenty five years ago. Driver's education there is quite expensive because one has to take many mandatory lessons. After all, once you have passed you get to drive on the Autobahn, which, to this date, has long stretches without a speed limit! I thought I was being clever by agreeing to write software for a driving school in exchange for free lessons. It turns out the clever one was the owner of the driving school who turned around and sold the software to several other schools.

So what would it have taken for me then to become an ISV (independent software vendor), other than actually having the idea? These were the early days of PCs. I would have had to spend a lot of money on marketing and a lot of time on in-person sales and on-premise / telephone support. Most ISVs at the time grew locally for that reason and it was not uncommon to have highly fragmented markets with literally dozens of different vendors. As the software would have grown past the very simple initial functionality that I had created, I would have had to write pretty much everything I needed myself. Need billing? Write a billing module. Need asset tracking? Write an asset tracking module. The marketplace for components evolved only much later and was almost as fragmented as the ISV market.

This situation persisted until quite recently. In fact, in 2003 I spent a year getting to know the market for software for trucking companies in the US (Why? That's a long story). That market still had essentially the same characteristics: highly fragmented, regional customer bases, and almost 100% monolithic custom systems.

Since then, the situation has changed dramatically. Today, creating new software means focusing on what the unique contribution is that one wants to offer and figuring out how to integrate with everything else. Need a spreadsheet? Use Google Apps. Need telephony? Use Twilio (disclosure: Twilio is a USV portfolio company). Marketing can happen on the web through keyword advertising and, better yet, SEO and customer sharing. For many solutions, even sales can be entirely web-based (enter a credit card!). Support can happen over the web and often users can support each other through community. Add cloud computing to the mix and you eliminate the fixed cost that was such a high barrier to entry in the early days of the web (I remember the extraordinary bills for servers and bandwidth in 1999!).

All of this has made it possible for small teams to create big successes. It is amazing what a few great coders can do, leveraging all the services that are now available. It is,however, not just the cost side of the business of code that has changed dramatically. Competition has gone global. Someone in a faraway place can create a system, and it is instantly available everywhere. The days of the profitable, regional ISV business are over. The source of competitive advantage has also shifted. In the past, if your solution had better features, you could land a sale even against a competitor that had more customers. Now, better features don't mean that much if the larger competitor has built a network effect into their business. Imagine trying to start a LinkedIn or Salesforce competitor with better features. So the very same forces that are making it much easier to get started are making it much harder to build a successful and sustainable business.

Does that mean that there will be fewer opportunities going forward? Maybe. But there is a strong countervailing force that is creating important new opportunities: the code of business is also changing. By the code of business, I mean how companies and industries (and even societies) are organized. At Union Square Ventures, we are convinced that over time, the Internet will transform most, if not all, industries as much as it is changing the software business. This has started with the media industry, where after years of prediction of change we are now seeing massive shifts.

The reason that the code of business will change is that much of it is based on historic constraints on the bandwidth and latency of information flows. For instance, a command-and-control type hierarchy is still at the heart of (almost) all large corporations. Information flows up the hierarchy with middle management in charge of aggregating information flows. Commands then flow down with middle management translating into finer grained actions. This basic structure dates back to a time of messengers and telegraphs. Corporations are slowly shifting away towards more of an Internet architecture of "small pieces, loosely joined" -- but in many cases the end state may mean that the "pieces" are independent, small companies instead of units of a large company.

These changes will take a great deal of time (decades) because existing structures have a ton of inertia. Far more people tend to be interested in preserving the status quo than in making radical changes. Also, when a whole system needs changing, it is often difficult to get there one piece-at-a-time because all the components need to fit together. But as they start to occur in other industries, the opportunities will be massive. To give just one example, consider education: the size of the textbook industry alone in the US is estimated at $7 billion annually. This is a pure content business ripe for disruption.

Enough reading -- time for everyone with a transformative idea to start coding!

By Albert Wenger, Union Square Ventures and Continuations.

Google PowerMeter API introduced for device manufacturers

Mike Marchak — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:55:00 +0000

Today we're excited to introduce the Google PowerMeter API on code.google.com, for developers interested in integrating with Google PowerMeter. This API will allow device manufacturers to build home energy monitoring devices that work with Google PowerMeter. We're launching this API in order to help build the ecosystem of innovative developers working towards making energy information more widely available to consumers.

In today's launch of the API on code.google.com we are highlighting the core design principles towards integrating with Google PowerMeter. In particular we outline the underlying data model and the accompanying protocols to ensure that Google PowerMeter provides consumers access to their energy consumption with utmost care in maintaining the user's privacy and control on access to the information. We also highlight, with code samples and client implementations, how to easily start building your PowerMeter-compatible device.

Tune into our blog and subscribe to our notification list for announcements on upcoming developments. We are thrilled to bring together a rich framework to help more developers integrate with Google PowerMeter with our open, standards-based API. We are looking to expose expanded features of this framework to the developer community in the coming months.

Finally, we want your feedback! Ask questions, suggest topics, and share your stories. You can do this at the Developer Lounge section of the Google PowerMeter forum.

We hope you join us for the ride ahead.

By Srikanth Rajagopalan, Product Manager

Mark your calendars for Google Code Jam 2010!

Mike Marchak — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:04:00 +0000

If you're reading this post, we know your passion is coding. You thrive when given the opportunity to tackle a challenge, and enjoy the rush of applying your knowledge and creativity to approach a problem. Once solved, there's nothing like the satisfaction that comes from knowing you've accomplished something great.

That's why we are excited to announce Google Code Jam 2010 to the true die-hard coding fans. Google Code Jam, powered by Google App Engine, is our annual programming competition, where thousands of coders around the world attack algorithmic problems in several 2.5-hour online rounds. If you make it through the first four rounds, you'll be flown to our on-site finals, to be held for the first time at the Google office in Dublin! Once there, you will compete with 24 other top coders for the $5,000 first prize -- and the coveted title of Code Jam champion.

We don't want you to miss out on any of the action, so we are announcing some important dates for Google Code Jam 2010. Mark your calendars:

Wednesday, April 7, 2010 | 19:00 UTC | Registration Begins
Friday, May 7, 2010 | 23:00 UTC | 24-hr Qualification Round Begins
Saturday, May 8, 2010 | 23:00 UTC | Registration Deadline & 24 hr Qualification Round Ends
Saturday, May 22, 2010 | 1:00 UTC | Online Round 1: Sub-Round A
Saturday, May 22, 2010 | 16:00 UTC | Online Round 1: Sub-Round B
Sunday, May 23, 2010 | 9:00 UTC | Online Round 1: Sub-Round C
Saturday, June 05, 2010 | 14:00 UTC | Online Round 2
Saturday, June 12, 2010 | 14:00 UTC | Online Round 3
Friday, July 30, 2010 | Google Office - Dublin, Ireland | Onsite FINALS

In the meantime, visit the Google Code Jam site and try out some of the practice problems so that you'll be ready to go once we kick off the qualification round. Hope to see you in Dublin on July 30th!

By Igor Naverniouk, Software Engineer

Introducing Google’s DoubleClick For Publishers API

Mike Marchak — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:50:00 +0000

Today, we announced the next generation of our ad serving technology for online publishers, the new DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) from Google. We are pleased to announce that the new version of DFP comes with a modern API that enables publishers and third-parties to customize and extend the product.

The new API is available to publishers who use DFP, as well as to third-parties and vendors who would like to build applications on top of DFP. A growing community of developers are already working on sales, order management, workflow and data visualization tools. We've incorporated feedback on the existing DART for Publishers API and believe the new API is a significant step forward. It uses SOAP, a standard and widely-adopted messaging technology that uses HTTP requests to transmit and receive XML data between your client and our servers. This means you can use it with virtually any programming language of your choice. We have a wealth of public documentation available online and there are numerous code samples and client libraries ready for you to download.

To learn more about the new API, there are a few places to get started:

The DoubleClick for Publishers API blog:
http://doubleclickpublishersapi.blogspot.com/

The Google Code site that hosts all of the documentation for the new API:
http://code.google.com/apis/dfp

The Google Groups forum where we provide support and where you can provide feedback to us:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-doubleclick-for-publishers-api/

We are looking forward to working with you and seeing what you build!

By Adam Rogal, DoubleClick For Publishers API Team

Announcing Google Chart Tools

Mike Marchak — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 02:00:00 +0000

A good chart can tell a story, such as depicting when you get home on Saturday night by plotting your tweet patterns along the week.

A good chart can take an elusive concept and clarify it in a visually appealing manner. This ingenious XKCD strip uses a pie chart, a bar chart and a recursive scatter plot, to demonstrate the concept of self description.

Whether you need a simple line chart, an interactive Geo Map or a complex Motion Chart , Google can help you add live charts to your web page using our Chart and Visualization APIs. Both of these APIs are free and simple to use, however they each have distinct advantages:

1. The Chart API provides Image Charts which are rendered by a Google chart server in response to a simple URL request. Image Charts are fast to render and can be easily emailed and printed. In addition to the extensive gallery of charts, this server now also provides dynamic icons, QR codes, and math formulas.

2. The Visualization API provides Interactive charts which are rendered on the browser using a Google developed JavaScript library. Interactive charts trigger events, providing tool-tips and animations. In addition to a rich gallery of charts, this tool can also read live data from a variety of data sources such as Oracle PL/SQL or Google spreadsheets.

We have discovered that developers occasionally need some help in navigating between the many options and distinct advantages of Image Charts and Interactive Charts, and therefore decided to bring the two APIs under one new framework which we call the "Google Chart Tools". We've accordingly renamed the APIs to Image Charts API and Interactive Charts API and created a simple side-by-side comparison page which you might find useful in choosing which chart tool is better for you.

Image Chart: Oceans of the world

Interactive Chart: Oceans of the world

We hope to meet you in person at Google I/O this May. In our Google Chart Tools I/O session we plan to present many of our new features including dynamic icons, which helped us plot our version of the recursive XKCD chart below:

By Michael Fink, Google Chart Tools team

Building Apps on Google Apps? A new blog just for you

Mike Marchak — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:24:00 +0000

We recently launched the Google Apps Developer Blog for developers interested in building applications that leverage Google Apps. This blog will cover topics of interest to Google Apps developers building applications on top of Google Apps, integrating with them or utilizing the APIs.

Don Dodge will be the editor and a frequent contributor to this new blog. Don is a Developer Advocate at Google helping developers build new applications on Google platforms and technologies. Don has been a startup evangelist at Microsoft and is also a veteran of five start-ups including Forte Software, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet, and Groove Networks.

You can follow the team's updates on Twitter, too – follow @googleappsdev – and, while you're at it, stay tuned to updates from the Google enterprise team at @googleatwork.

By Mike Marchak, Google developer team

Who’s @ Google I/O: spotlight on Social Web (including Buzz!)

Mike Marchak — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:43:00 +0000

Following on the heels of today's announcement on Buzz, we're excited to bring you the latest on all things social at Google I/O, starting with a session on Buzz APIs and a new panel session!

What's the hubbub about Google Buzz APIs?
Google Buzz is a new way to share updates, photos, videos and more, and start conversations about the things you find interesting. In this session, we'll take a deep dive into building with the Buzz APIs and the open standards it uses, such as ActivityStrea.ms, PubSubHubbub, OAuth, Salmon and WebFinger.

Where is the social web going next?
With the advent of social protocols like OAuth, OpenID and ActivityStrea.ms, it's clear that the web has gone social and is becoming more open. Adam Nash (LinkedIn), Daniel Raffel (Yahoo), John Panzer (Google), Lili Cheng (Microsoft), Monica Keller (MySpace), and Ryan Sarver (Twitter) will discuss the importance of such emerging technologies, how they've adopted them in their products and debate what's next.

Here are additional sessions that'll give you a deep dive into the emerging technologies and standards that will help you create a more engaging user experience for your web applications and sites, and enable a people-centric web.

Optimize your site with Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, Twitter, & more

iGoogle developer portal and tools

Make your application real-time with PubSubHubbub

The open & social web

You'll also have the opportunity to meet developers from the following companies in the Social Web pod of the Developer Sandbox: Atlassian, eBay, IBM, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Playfish, Yahoo!, and Voxeo. They'll be demoing their social apps, talking in-depth about integrating with various Google technologies, answering questions, and chatting with attendees.

To learn more about and register for Google I/O, visit code.google.com/io. We add new sessions and content to the I/O website each week, so follow @googleio on Twitter to keep up with changes!

By Joyce Sohn, Google Developer Team

Update on Google I/O BootCamp

Mike Marchak — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Earlier this week, we announced the introduction of I/O BootCamp, a new event happening the day before Google I/O. We didn't anticipate the level of interest we've seen in just the last few days, and we're both excited and sorry to let you know that I/O BootCamp is now sold out.

However, we are accepting waitlist sign-ups. So if you'd like to attend I/O BootCamp, submit your info on the BootCamp website, and we'll email you if a spot opens up.

Please remember that I/O BootCamp is only available to those who've already registered for Google I/O. If you'd like learn more about and register for Google I/O, visit code.google.com/io.

By Joyce Sohn, Google Developer Team

Who’s @ Google I/O: spotlight on Enterprise sessions

Mike Marchak — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:20:00 +0000

Each week in our "Who's @ Google I/O" blog series, we'll highlight the latest from a featured track at I/O. This week, the spotlight is on Enterprise -- a major theme of this year's event.

In 2009, we saw an increasing number of large companies moving to the cloud (and "Going Google"), choosing the web as their platform of choice. At I/O, we'll share our enterprise and commercial developer offerings and focus on how to build business apps in the cloud.

We'll be adding new Enterprise sessions over the next couple of months, but here's a preview of some of the sessions you'll see at I/O:

Customizing Google Apps & integrating with customer environments
Hear real-life examples of customizing Google Apps to meet customer requirements from several panelists, including two of our Sandbox participants -- Iein Valdez of Appirio and Michael Cohn of CloudSherpas. Explore integration issues and deployment best practices with the people who have done it.

Run corporate applications on Google App Engine? Yes we do.
Our CIO, Ben Fried, describes how Google IT and other companies use the latest Google App Engine enhancements to respond more quickly to business needs while reducing operational burden to near zero.

It’s 2010: How is your move to the cloud doing?
Come discover the latest innovations from Google enabling IT and ISV developers to build on Google's cloud-based storage and computing offerings. This talk will give a complete overview of Google's commercial developer products and provide insights and best practices so enterprise developers can take more advantage of the cloud.

Launch your app inside of Google Apps with gadgets
Gadgets represent a valuable opportunity to get in front of the many Google Apps users who use Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Sites throughout the day. This session will talk about how you can write gadgets as natural extensions of your existing products and take advantage of the unique opportunities available to gadgets in Google Apps.

Making Freemium work - converting free users to paying customers
Don Dodge will moderate a panel of prominent venture capital leaders (Brad Feld, Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, Matt Holleran) to help you understand how to build free apps that can be upgraded to paid & how to build products that can be profitable.

You can find the current list of Enterprise sessions here.

To learn more about and register for Google I/O, visit code.google.com/io. We add new sessions and content to the I/O website each week so follow @googleio on Twitter to keep up with changes!

By Joyce Sohn, Google Developer Team

Enlist in BootCamp for Google I/O

Mike Marchak — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:35:00 +0000

This year, we're introducing I/O BootCamp, a new event happening the day before Google I/O. BootCamp is an opportunity for attendees to get a crash course in our major development platforms and tools before they head into Google I/O. BootCamp will feature introductory "101" content, hands-on lab sessions, and community-led discussions.

BootCamp is only available to those who are registered to attend Google I/O. Since space is limited, we ask that interested Google I/O attendees please register at our BootCamp site.

To register for Google I/O, please visit code.google.com/io.

By Stephanie Liu, Google Developer Team

A proposal to extend the DNS protocol

Mike Marchak — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:52:00 +0000

Today a group of DNS and content providers, including Neustar/UltraDNS and Google are publishing a proposal to extend the DNS protocol. DNS is the system that translates an easy-to-remember name like www.google.com to a numeric address like 74.125.45.104. These are the IP addresses that computers use to communicate with one another on the Internet.

By returning different addresses to requests coming from different places, DNS can be used to load balance traffic and send users to a nearby server. For example, if you look up www.google.com from a computer in New York, it may resolve to an IP address pointing to a server in New York City. If you look up www.google.com from the Netherlands, the result could be an IP address pointing to a server in the Netherlands. Sending you to a nearby server improves speed, latency, and network utilization.

Currently, to determine your location, authoritative nameservers look at the source IP address of the incoming request, which is the IP address of your DNS resolver, rather than your IP address. This DNS resolver is often managed by your ISP or alternately is a third-party resolver like Google Public DNS. In most cases the resolver is close to its users, in which case the authoritative nameservers will be able to find the nearest server. However, some DNS resolvers serve many users over a wider area. In these cases, your lookup for www.google.com may return the IP address of a server several countries away from you. If the authoritative nameserver could detect where you were, a closer server might have been available.

Our proposed DNS protocol extension lets recursive DNS resolvers include part of your IP address in the request sent to authoritative nameservers. Only the first three octets, or top 24 bits, are sent providing enough information to the authoritative nameserver to determine your network location, without affecting your privacy.

The Internet-Draft was posted to the dnsext mailing list today, and over the next few months our group hopes to see this proposal accepted as an official Internet standard. We plan to continue working with all interested parties on implementing this solution and are looking forward to a healthy discussion on the dnsext mailing list.

By Wilmer van der Gaast and Carlo Contavalli on behalf of the Google Public DNS team

Create and share Google Sites with new Sites Data API features

Mike Marchak — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:24:00 +0000

Several months ago we launched the Google Sites Data API. Since then, we've worked hard to respond to your top feature requests: the ability to list a user's sites, create new sites, copy existing sites, and manage sharing permissions. Today, we are very excited to announce the release of the Site and Access Control List feeds that make these new features possible.

The Site feed allows your client to list sites and update their properties, such as the title or the theme of the site. Google Apps users can also create new sites. Because creating new sites often involves copying existing ones (perhaps using a site template), we've enabled that feature too.

Here's an example of the kinds of applications you can build with those features. Let's say you're a professor at a university and you'd like to create a Google Site for each of the courses you teach. The Site feed makes it possible for you to create a site course template, use the site feed to create several course sites, and personalize them with the content feed.

But what if you want to restrict access to your sites to just the students taking those courses? With the ACL (Access Control List) feed, you can manage sharing permissions. Everything you can do in the Google Sites admin panel, you can do with the API.

To get the full scoop, review the documentation and change log. We've loaded the Java client library and Python client library with the new features, and offer updated developer guides for both.

Visit us in our new developer forum if you have questions!

By Laurent Tu & Eric Bidelman - Google Sites API Team

Extensibility + new HTML and JavaScript APIs for Google Chrome

Mike Marchak — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:39:00 +0000

Today's new stable release of Google Chrome for Windows includes a bundle of browser goodness, including extensions and new HTML and JavaScript APIs.

Extensions -- previously available on Google Chrome for Windows on the beta channel -- and are now available to all users. Extensions enable you to provide additional functionality not just on your site, but to bring content and functionality from your site into the browser regardless of what sites the user has open. Google Chrome extensions use the same multiprocess technology that makes the browser fast and more secure, so that extensions won't crash or slow down your browser.

In addition, we're excited to introduce a number of new HTML and JavaScript APIs in Google Chrome, including the Web Storage and Web SQL Database APIs, WebSockets, and more. For more details about these APIs, read further on the Chromium Blog.

If you have questions about the extensions APIs, the extensions discussion group continues to be the best place to get answers. For the new HTML and JavaScript APIs, check out the newly created Chromium HTML5 group. And for those of you who are interested in attending Google I/O, check out the current list of Google Chrome sessions.

By Ian Fette, Product Manager, Google Chrome

Documents List API: Upload any file type and more!

Mike Marchak — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:00:00 +0000

As just announced over on the Enterprise blog, Google Docs now allows users to upload any type of file! Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be rolling out the same feature in the Documents List Data API. For now, uploading arbitrary files via the API will be restricted to Google Apps Premier domains. For starters, each user gets 1GB of storage with a maximum size of 250 MB per file.

Combined with the shared folders feature of Google Docs, we think this new feature is a great way to build collaborative applications for exchanging files with coworkers and external parties. No more email attachments!

In addition to arbitrary file upload, we’re launching several top features requested by developers:

Copy a document - Make a duplicate of a document in a single call

Publishing documents - Programmatically publish a document to the world.

Change the owner of a document - While ACLs and sharing have been in the API for quite some time, you can now change the ‘owner’ of a document.

Resumable uploads - Offers the ability to pause/resume an upload. It’s ideal for large file sizes.

Look for resumable upload support in the Java, Python, and Objective-C client libraries in the near future. As always, if you have any questions, please visit us in our new developer forum.

Issues resolved in this release: 72, 1040, 1675, 1260, 1741, 1127

By Eric Bidelman, Google Docs Team

A look back on 2009

Mike Marchak — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:35:00 +0000

2009 was a remarkable year for developers. Vic Gundotra, VP of our developer team declared at Google I/O, "The web has won!" and this year was full of launches and announcements that remind us how the web has become the platform of our day. We found lots of inspiration from the developers at Google I/O in San Francisco and at our Google Developer Days in Japan, China, Brazil, Russia and the Czech Republic.

Here's a look back at some of our favorite highlights from 2009:

Faster Apps Faster - the theme for the recent Campfire One event letting developers know how GWT 2.0 decreases development time (it's being used by Google Wave & Adwords for this reason) and how Speed Tracer gives you new insight into speeding up your apps

Make the Web faster - as part of an effort to Make the web faster we launched tools like Page-Speed and our DNS resolution service. We also made our internal JavaScript tools available, called Closure Tools, so you can rev up your js like the guys on Gmail. With PubSubHubbub all your feeds can be real-time streams.

A faster browser - A few weeks ago we launched Google Chrome for Mac and Linux, along with an extension framework for Chrome and a gallery for developers to distribute their extensions -- there are over 900 to check out already! Chrome has a set of developer tools built on WebKit to help optimize your code. Plus, we released details of Chrome OS...a netbook operating system for speed freaks. Along the way, we've worked with the larger web community contributing to the exciting future of the web with HTML5.

Mobile - Android launched on one device in one country on one carrier in 2008. This year, 20 devices in 26 countries on 32 carriers have been launched or announced. Developers have created over 16,000 apps in the Android Marketplace. Some were winners of our second Android Developer Challenge. We launched new mobile versions of gmail and calendar using HTML5. You can take a picture to search using Google Goggles and get turn-by-turn navigation with Google maps. Plus, we recently announced our mobile lab for Android hardware.

Hosting - App Engine apps were allowed to scale beyond free quotas and Java developers were invited to try it out at Campfire 1 in April. Developers responded, with over 100K apps built on App Engine. Open source developers using Project Hosting were able to host projects on Mercurial, in addition to Subversion.

New APIs - Google Wave was released early to developers at Google I/O in May. Wave is "equal parts conversation and document" and showcases what is possible in the browser. Developers can build robot extensions to automate common tasks or build gadget extensions to provide a new way for users to interact. Google Maps released v3, Friend Connect got more personalized and then got cozy w/ Twitter, Google Analytics released an API and then added asynchronous tracking.

Google Web Elements - From maps to search to translate and more, Google Web Elements made it even easier than ever to add Google products to your site.

Labs - Google Code Labs was created to let developers know which APIs and products are cutting edge labs "experiments" and which we are committed to supporting for the long term.

It is a very exciting time to be a developer...we are just starting to see what is possible with the web as the platform. It will be a lot of fun to see where all of us, together, can take the web in 2010!

Happy Holidays from the Google Developer Team!

By Mike Marchak, on behalf of the Google Developer Team

Google Analytics API v2 Python Client Library

Mike Marchak — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:33:00 +0000

We know it's easier for developers to program in the languages they know. So we updated the Google Analytics API Python Client library with all the new API version 2 features and added reference exampels for both the Account Feed and Data Feed. Now it's easier than ever to automate your analysis workflow using our API.

Taking The Library For a Spin

With the updated library, we thought it would be a great time to highlight the power of the new v2 features. So we created a sample application to do just that. The application uses the new Google Analytics Python client library to retrieve metrics for a series of segments. It then performs some calculations on the data and creates bar charts using the GChartWrapper package, an open source Python wrapper for the Google Charts API. Finally, it uses the Python Imaging Library to add a title and legend, and stitches all the charts together into a single image. We decided to release this application as open source so you can create visualizations with your own data.

Solving Business Problems

With social media all the rage, we wanted to use this new application to help Avinash Kaushik, our Analytics Evangelist, to measure "engagement" on his popular Occam's Razor blog. We also wanted to determine if the time he spends participating in social media sites is valuable and sends new readers to his blog.

First we created segments to pull all the referrals from Facebook and Twitter. Second, we chose five calculations and corresponding metrics to compare the performance of thee two segments. We then compared the segments to each other and, for context, to all the visits to the site as a control.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, here are the results:

Let's Analyze

Some interesting observations become apparent.

Far more visits originate from Twitter (3.6x) when compared to Facebook, perhaps not surprising given Avinash's Twitter followers (~16,120)
Visitors from Twitter tend to be new visitors, a good thing, but they view fewer pages and spend significantly less time on the blog.
On the other hand Facebook delivers an audience that is loyal. These visitors come back to the site more often and spend a significant time on the blog (compared to Twitter and all other visitors).

The bottom line? Even though social networking sites are all the rage, they actually contribute very little to Avinash's blog. If this blog were a company, it would be wise to ensure the time and effort put into driving traffic from social media is proportionate to the actual volume of traffic and goal conversions from those sites.

Hopefully this example shows how powerful our new features can be.

If you're interested in running this report against your own data, the application is free and open sourced. Additionally, we made it really easy to change the metrics, segments, calculations and all the other visual properties to power your own visualizations. So please download it here and give it a whirl, we would love to hear your feedback.

By Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

Introducing Google Browser Size

Mike Marchak — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 01:10:00 +0000

When I started work at Google, I visited the Google Earth team, hoping to find a 20% project on my favorite Google product. There I met Bruno Bowden, who introduced me to a problem I had never thought much about: how to take browser sizes into account when designing a page.

Bruno had noticed that many people who visit the “Download Google Earth” page never actually download, even though, as you can see, the button is pretty hard to miss:

He wondered if a significant number of users might have their browser windows too small to see the button:

To analyze this, Bruno looked at how large people's browser windows were when they visited this page. His first key idea was to measure not the entire browser window, but just the client area -- no toolbars, status bars, or other chrome.

Bruno's second key idea was to render several weeks' worth of page visitor browser sizes in a contour visualization:

Using this visualization, Bruno confirmed that about 10% of users couldn't see the download button without scrolling, and thus never noticed it. 10% may not sound like a lot, but in this context it turns out to mean a significant number of people weren't downloading Google Earth. Using this data, the team was able to redesign the page to good effect.

Bruno and I realized that Web designers might benefit from this information if it could be made more generally available. We constructed a page that could overlay a DIV containing the contour visualization atop an IFRAME containing any other Web page:

This turned out to be a good way to see which controls were and weren't visible at typical browser sizes. The only problem was, the overlay DIV prevented mouse events from getting to the page IFRAME, so it wasn't possible to interact with the page.

To solve this, we split the overlay DIV into four:

Each of the outlines above (red, yellow, blue, green) represents a separate DIV. As the mouse pointer moves, we resize and reposition the DIVs to leave a small window of blank space around the pointer, and adjust background offsets for each DIV to make the overlay look like one seamless graphic. (We originally did this on a timer, but we found a simpler way: when the mouse touches any of the DIVs, resize/reposition all of the DIVs.) End result: a designer can click and otherwise interact with the page with the mouse, and thus interact with the site normally instead of repeatedly typing in URLs.

We are now making this tool available to the public on Google Labs. To try it, simply visit browsersize.googlelabs.com and enter the URL of a page you'd like to examine. The size overlay you see is using latest data from visitors to google.com, so this should give you a pretty good indication of what parts of your UI are generally visible and what aren't.

We look forward to receiving your comments at browser-size-external-feedback!

By Arthur Blume on behalf of the Google Browser Size team

Google Fusion Tables API

Mike Marchak — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:11:00 +0000

Today I'm excited to announce that Google Fusion Tables is releasing its own API.

What is Fusion Tables? A product launched recently in Google Labs, Fusion Tables is a free service for sharing and visualizing data online. It allows you to upload data, share and mark up your data with collaborators, merge data from multiple tables, and create visualizations like charts and maps.

Do you have data you need to share with other organizations? In Fusion Tables, you can share all or part of a table with other people. Does your data mean more when seen together with other datasets you don't own? By merging your data with other people's shared tables, you can see the whole picture in one place, discuss the data in embedded comments, and mark up the data with your collaborators. Fusion Tables keeps track of who contributed each part of the data and who has permission to edit.

Watch Circle of Blue's video description of how they use Fusion Tables to combine and visualize water data.

Often the real meaning and potential impact of a database can be hidden behind all the raw names and numbers, but a well-chosen visualization can bring the data to life. Fusion Tables has automatic data visualization built in: we've integrated with the Google Maps API and the Google Visualization API so you can view your data in maps, motion charts, and graphs. All of these can be embedded in your webpage, your Google Site, your blog...any Web page you want! The visualizations even update automatically as data is updated or corrected. Embed the visualization once, and the latest version will always be shown automatically.

Let other people help spot outliers and unexpected values in your dataset by linking them directly to data that is filtered, aggregated, and visualized for various angles of examination. Fusion Tables' data discussion features help you gather feedback from your community.

Is your dataset active, always changing? Is it being collected right now on cell phones or websites? With the new Fusion Tables API, you can update and query your dataset in Fusion Tables programmatically, without ever logging in to the Fusion Tables website. The API means you can import data from whatever data source you may have, whether a text file or a full-powered data base. On the more exotic side, imagine you're collecting data via survey software on GPS-enabled cell phones, as the Open Data Kit project is doing. Open Data Kit uses Google App Engine and the Fusion Tables API to instantly map locations of survey results.

Are you a data exhibitionist? Put your data in Fusion Tables and make it available for the world to see! Fusion Tables will maintain your attribution as your data participates in other tables, enforce your choices about sharing and exporting the data, and invite Google Web Search to index the table.

Fusion Tables allows datasets to play together in a safe, collaborative, and privacy-controlled environment. We can't wait to hear about the amazing things you will make happen with Fusion Tables.

By Anno Langen, Jayant Madhavan and Rebecca Shapley, Google Fusion Tables Team

Google Developer Days 2009 come to an end

Mike Marchak — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:00:00 +0000

We've concluded Google Developer Days 2009, a set of one-day developer events that travel around the world. This year, they started in Beijing, China on June 5 and ended in Moscow, Russia on November 10. At each event, attendees had the opportunity to learn about Google's newest web technologies with products such as Google Wave, Android, Chrome, Google Web Toolkit, OpenSocial, and App Engine. They also interacted with Google developers during "office hours" and had the chance to see how other developers are using Google technologies for their own applications at various demo areas.

We have finished posting the presentations and photos from our final events of the year, and hopefully each location's page will continue to be a useful resource for you. Thank you for making these such great events! We look forward to seeing you in 2010...

By Alyssa England Sachs, Google Developer Team

New features for Google Web Elements

Mike Marchak — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:30:00 +0000

Earlier this year we introduced Google Web Elements, an easy way to embed Google products on your site by simply copying and pasting a snippet of code. Today we're excited to announce the addition of three new Web Elements:

Translate element

The Translate element enables visitors to automatically translate your pages into their native language, extending the reach of your website to a global audience. Even better, it will know when their language doesn't match your site's. Have some multi-lingual visitors? Don't worry, they'll be able to turn it off completely.

Note that whether or not the Translate element pops up is based on the language of your web browser. In order to test what other language visitors will see on your site, you'll have to follow the directions here to change your browser's language.

Reader element

The Reader element embeds the headlines from your recent shared items on Google Reader right on your website. You can customize the element by choosing how many items to show and the color scheme. The headlines shown in the Reader element will automatically update as you share or unshare items.

Orkut element

The Orkut element makes it easy for your website's visitors to share your site on their Orkut page. When visitors to your site click the button, they'll be able to share your website content with their Orkut friends with a couple clicks

We've also added a couple new features that we hope you'll enjoy:

Custom Search element themes: The Custom Search element lets visitors search your site (or other content defined by you) and enables you to earn revenue (via AdSense) from highly relevant ads that are displayed in the search results. You've always been able to richly style this element (we described a couple ways in this blog post), but that required knowing JavaScript and CSS. Now you can adjust the look and feel of the element to better integrate with your site, without having to code anything.

Login integration: The Google Web Elements website is now integrated with your Google account. By logging in (if you're not logged in already), you'll be able to more easily select your Calendar, Presentation or Spreadsheet in creating your element. Login is also required to personalize your Reader element.

Document selector: Once logged into the Google Web Elements website, you'll be able to easily search through your data when creating a Calendar, Presentation or Spreadsheet element. All you have to do is click the "Choose" button and select the one that you would like to use with your element. You still have the option of pasting in a URL (for instance, if you wish to use a document not associated with your account), but this is no longer required.

We hope you enjoy these new additions to the Web Elements family! To get started, check out www.google.com/webelements.

By Christine Tsai, Web Elements Team

Google Web Toolkit 2.0 – now with Speed Tracer

Mike Marchak — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 03:00:00 +0000

Tonight at a Google Campfire One we released Google Web Toolkit 2.0, aiming to do two main things for developers:

Make it easier to build faster apps
Speed up the overall development cycle

This is a very exciting release because it's the cumulation of a year and a half working with teams like Google Wave, AdWords, and Orkut (among many others inside and outside of Google) to evolve GWT to meet the needs of today's web applications. There are many features and improvements, but let me call out three which we're especially excited about.

Faster Apps

Introducing: Performance profiling with Speed Tracer
The first thing you'll notice in 2.0 is that we've added a new tool called Speed Tracer. Speed Tracer is a performance profiler for Google Chrome that allows developers to see what's going on in a way which hasn't been possible before. We've worked closely with the Webkit community to add instrumentation in the browser to enable developers to gain deep insights into how code behaves, uncovering problems which have been hidden up till now.

Introducing: Incremental app download with code splitting
Another feature we've added into Google Web Toolkit is developer-guided code splitting. Code splitting allows a developer to split up their application for much, much faster startup times. Imagine if you have a settings page that users go to once a week. Why download that JavaScript when the application starts up? With code splitting, your users download just the JavaScript they need to get started.

Faster Development

Introducing: Declarative UI with UiBinder
UiBinder is a new declarative UI framework in Google Web Toolkit which enables rapid design iteration and a clean separation between presentation layer and application logic.

Dive into the details and more features in GWT 2.0.

By Andrew Bowers, GWT Product Manager

Google Chrome Extensions launched in beta!

Mike Marchak — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:27:00 +0000

Today, we launched Google Chrome's extensions system in the beta channel for Windows and Linux (Mac is in progress). We've also opened up our brand new gallery, which contains more than 300 extensions!

We aspired to create an extensions system that is easy to use, stable, more secure and that wouldn't slow down Google Chrome. We're really happy to release a beta that begins to deliver on our initial vision. If you want to learn more about Google Chrome extensions, you can start by reading our docs and joining our mailing list. You can also check out the videos below:

You can also meet us in person - let us know if you want to join us in a small get together tomorrow on our campus in Mountain View (or via VC in New York and Kirkland). Space is limited - we'd love to see many of you there so RSVP early and we'll email you more information if you are selected to attend. You can also meet the team at Add-on Con, where we will participate in a couple of panels.

Finally for those of you who are far away, we are planning some online developer tutorial sessions. If you are interested in attending, please fill in this form.

By Erik Kay and Aaron Boodman, Google Chrome Software Engineers

Google Translator Toolkit Data API

Mike Marchak — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:22:00 +0000

Today, we're excited to announce the release of the Google Translator Toolkit Data API. Translator Toolkit is a powerful but easy-to-use editor that enables translators to bring a human touch to machine translation through translation search, bilingual dictionaries, and custom terminology databases. Using Translator Toolkit, you can translate HTML, Word, AdWords, Wikipedia, and other documents in a WYSIWYG ("what-you-see-is-what-you-get") editor, share them with other users, and download their translations onto your desktop.

Through our new API, you can upload, share, download, and delete your documents, glossaries, and translation memories using the Google Data Protocol. That means that integrating human translation into your translators' workflow just got easier! Here are a few things you can do with the Translator Toolkit API:

Automatically connect your content management system (CMS) with Translator Toolkit. You can transform your content into HTML files, protect sections of HTML from translation through the class="notranslate" attribute, upload the HTML files, share the files with your translators, download the translated HTML, and then transform and upload the documents back into your CMS.

Automatically connect your file system with Translator Toolkit. You can create a cron job that uploads files into Translator Toolkit, shares the files with your translators, then downloads completed files back to the file system.

For now, the API is available in labs as we rapidly add features based on your feedback. Check out our documentation, where you'll find our Java client library and a developer guide to get you started. Please visit our new developer forum if you have questions.

By Mayank Gupta and Paneendra Ba, Google Translator Toolkit Team

Introducing Google Public DNS: A new DNS resolver from Google

Mike Marchak — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:30:00 +0000

Today, as part of our efforts to make the web faster, we are announcing Google Public DNS, a new experimental public DNS resolver.

The DNS protocol is an important part of the web's infrastructure, serving as the Internet's "phone book". Every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they complete loading. As a result, the average Internet user performs hundreds of DNS lookups each day, that collectively can slow down his or her browsing experience.

We believe that a faster DNS infrastructure could significantly improve the browsing experience for all web users. To enhance DNS speed but to also improve security and validity of results, Google Public DNS is trying a few different approaches that we are sharing with the broader web community through our documentation:

Speed: Resolver-side cache misses are one of the primary contributors to sluggish DNS responses. Clever caching techniques can help increase the speed of these responses. Google Public DNS implements prefetching: before the TTL on a record expires, we refresh the record continuously, asychronously and independently of user requests for a large number of popular domains. This allows Google Public DNS to serve many DNS requests in the round trip time it takes a packet to travel to our servers and back.

Security: DNS is vulnerable to spoofing attacks that can poison the cache of a nameserver and can route all its users to a malicious website. Until new protocols like DNSSEC get widely adopted, resolvers need to take additional measures to keep their caches secure. Google Public DNS makes it more difficult for attackers to spoof valid responses by randomizing the case of query names and including additional data in its DNS messages.

Validity: Google Public DNS complies with the DNS standards and gives the user the exact response his or her computer expects without performing any blocking, filtering, or redirection that may hamper a user's browsing experience.

We hope that you will help us test these improvements by using the Google Public DNS service today, from wherever you are in the world. We plan to share what we learn from this experimental rollout of Google Public DNS with the broader web community and other DNS providers, to improve the browsing experience for Internet users globally.

To get more information on Google Public DNS you can visit our site, read our documentation, and our logging policies. We also look forward to receiving your feedback in our discussion group.

By Prem Ramaswami, Public DNS Team

Deeper integration for Friend Connect and Twitter

Mike Marchak — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:37:00 +0000

Did you hear that Friend Connect and Twitter are more closely integrated than ever? To learn more, check out our post on the Social Web Blog.

By James Reilly, Google Friend Connect Team

Additional functionality for Google Chrome’s Developer Tools

Mike Marchak — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:00:00 +0000

The last few weeks, Google Chrome's developer tools have become much more useful. Besides benefiting from the work the WebKit team has done to improve Web Inspector (our developer tools are partially based on Web Inspector), we also recently released the heap profiler and the timeline tab in Google Chrome's Developer Channel.

With the heap profiler you can now take a snapshot of the JavaScript heap at any point in time. A heap snapshot helps you understand memory usage, and by comparing snapshots you can also follow memory usage over time. You will find the heap profiler in the profiles tab along with the sample-based CPU profiler.

The new timeline view gives you a complete overview of where time is spent when loading a web app. All events -- ranging from loading resources over parsing and executing JavaScript to calculating styles and repainting -- are plotted on a timeline.

Besides these product improvements, we've tried to make the Google Chrome Developer tools easier to find and understand by putting together mini site with tutorials and videos.

To take our newest release for a spin, get Google Chrome from the Developer Channel and you'll automatically be brought up to date. We welcome your feedback and your contributions to improve developer tools in WebKit and Google Chrome even more.

By Pavel Feldman, Software Engineer and Anders Sandholm, Product Manager

Captions available for all Google I/O videos

Mike Marchak — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:40:00 +0000

We work hard to make sure that the videos on the GoogleDevelopers channel on Youtube are captioned, but when I/O added over a hundred hours of video content, we got a little behind. I'm happy to announce that we're finally caught up! Every English and Spanish video from I/O now has captions that you can turn on in YouTube.

Didn't know we had captions? Just click to select captions from the menu in the lower right corner of the video player.

Some caption and subtitle-related news:

A group of volunteers from Russia used the translated.by software to crowdsource translation for Google Wave video captions. Thank you, habratranslation! Check out one of the Wave videos with Russian subtitles. (You have to choose Russian from the caption menu in YouTube to see them.)

If you'd like to help translate captions for any of our videos, please email google-video-captions@googlegroups.com with a request. We'd be happy to share any caption files that you might be interested in under a creative commons attribution license. If you send us the translation, we'll credit you in the video caption track and blog about how awesome you are.

In addition to machine translation for captions, YouTube now provides experimental automatic caption transcription using the same speech recognition algorithms found in Google Voice. The GoogleDevelopers channel is part of the initial pilot, so this feature is available on many of our videos. To learn more, check out the blog post on the Official Google Blog.

By Naomi Bilodeau, Google Developer Team

The latest addition to Google’s open source projects

Mike Marchak — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:20:00 +0000

Did you know Google has released more than 300 open source projects to date? Yesterday, we announced the latest addition to Google's open source projects - YouTube Direct, a new tool that enables any developer to solicit video submissions, moderate and display them on their website, all powered by YouTube. We recognize the role that open source plays at Google and how it helps us create better applications and we try to give back to the community as much as possible.

YouTube Direct was built on top of YouTube's public APIs and is designed to run on Google App Engine - Google's highly scalable platform. To date, several media organizations like ABC News, The Huffington Post and Politico have taken advantage of the open platform to deploy their own version of YouTube Direct to empower citizen journalism and enrich their site in the process. We look forward to see for more creative usage of the tool.

By Amanda Surya, YouTube Direct team

Welcome to Google Developer Relations, Don!

Mike Marchak — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:38:00 +0000

A couple days ago, Google welcomed Don Dodge to our Developer Relations team, where he joins us as a Developer Advocate working with developers, startups, and other Google Apps partners. We're expecting Don to be a fantastic addition to our team. He's already a prominent voice in the developer community, well-known and highly-regarded among entrepreneurs, technologists, and the media.

In the TechCrunch post first announcing Don's availability, Michael Arrington wrote how Don, "makes a big effort to give young startups the attention they deserve. This is a guy who gives a heck of a lot more to the community than he ever takes back." This dedication to the community of developers and the businesses they build is one of the things that excites us the most about having Don on our team. These businesses have been central to Google's success over the years, so we already know that Don's attitude will fit right in with our efforts. Don has deep experience working in startups from his days at companies like AltaVista, Napster, and Groove Networks, and has always continued to maintain the connection and passion for that community since leaving their ranks to join Microsoft, and now Google. We are eager for Don to share his personal experience and professional insights with developers and small businesses integrating with Google Apps, and be an advocate for developers and partners inside the company.

Don already wrote about his first day on the job at Google. Tomorrow you can hear him speak on the Enterprise Cloud Summit Panel in New York City. You can follow Don on his personal blog, email him at dondodge at google.com, or follow @dondodge on Twitter.

By Michael Winton, Google Developer Relations

Go: A New Programming Language

Mike Marchak — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:40:00 +0000

Have you heard about Go? We released a new, experimental systems programming language today. It is open source and we're excited about sharing it with the development community. For more information, check out the Google Open Source blog.

By Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Ian Taylor, Russ Cox, Jini Kim and Adam Langley - The Go Team