August 12th, 2009 | by Dan Holevoet | published in iGoogle
If you’ve been a devoted reader of this blog you’re probably no stranger to the idea that “social is better” when it comes to the web. Activities such as reading the news, doing a crossword puzzle, sharing a todo list, or watching a video are all bette…
August 5th, 2009 | by Dan Holevoet | published in iGoogle
Not so long ago we wrote about the need to keep your social gadgets robust to adversity. We received a lot of questions about how to detect when social conditions have broken down, and what to tell users when they have. So here’s a quick cheatsheet for…
July 2nd, 2009 | by Dan Holevoet | published in iGoogle
Over the last few days, we’ve introduced several improvements to the sandbox to help flesh out what the full social experience will look like for your users.First, sharing a gadget is a richer experience — requestShareApp invites now display notifica…
July 2nd, 2009 | by Dan Holevoet | published in iGoogle
Some of you may have noticed that OpenSocial API calls in the sandbox have started returning 401s, regardless of whether or not you’ve enabled social ACLs in your gadget. We’re in the process of changing a few things behind the scenes, one of which has…
May 26th, 2009 | by Dan Holevoet | published in iGoogle
Updates are back! As the launch of OpenSocial support for iGoogle draws ever closer, we wanted to give you guys more ability to test and refine your gadget’s use of the activity stream. To that end we encourage you to install the Updates gadget which …
May 14th, 2009 | by Dan Holevoet | published in iGoogle
A lot of the content we post on this blog is about social. Social is new, social is big, social is better (all true!) … but, non-social is important too, and gadgets should behave gracefully when users have not enabled social features, or they aren’…
May 5th, 2009 | by Dan Holevoet | published in iGoogle
Writing software is hard, and it’s easy for bugs to creep in. Gadgets are no different. And while developing gadgets here at Google, we discovered that many gadget bugs only show up when you’ve finished developing — like when Japanese users can’t se…
April 6th, 2009 | by Ruth Brennan | published in Google Conversions, iGoogle
A few weeks ago, we introduced Google Insights for Search and showed you how you can capitalise on search trends by knowing what your target audience are searching for on Google. Using on-trend search terms within your online marketing campaigns will …
April 3rd, 2009 | by Dan Holevoet | published in iGoogle
In case you haven’t seen the announcement on the OpenSocial blog, some changes to the way iGoogle’s REST and RPC endpoints verify requests will be going live today, on the developer sandbox. If you’re using a client library (Java, PHP, Python, Ruby), t…
March 19th, 2009 | by Dan Holevoet | published in iGoogle
The iGoogle developer sandbox has always served as the bleeding edge version of iGoogle. It’s the place to go when you want to be the first to try out new features. Unfortunately, if a bug sneaks into a sandbox release it can grind gadget development t…
February 24th, 2009 | by Dan Holevoet | published in iGoogle
Can’t figure out if your account is in the developer sandbox or not? Sometimes the “Welcome to the iGoogle Developer sandbox” message is obscured. Sometimes developers are confused about the behavior of the http://google.com/ig/sandbox page (which acts…
January 23rd, 2009 | by Dan Holevoet | published in iGoogle
If you’ve had a chance to look at recent gadgets documentation, or tried out the iGoogle developer sandbox, you’re probably aware that gadgets.* is the new hotness. Sadly, the _IG_* methods are all that work in production.Starting within the next month…
January 14th, 2009 | by Dan Holevoet | published in iGoogle
Up until today, gadgets installed in the iGoogle developer sandbox had implicit access to social data, with no way for users to opt-out without uninstalling the gadget. We’ve added a feature to give more finely-grained control to users and allow users…
December 19th, 2008 | by Dan Holevoet | published in iGoogle
If you’ve got Firebug installed on your iGoogle page, you may have noticed how requests to fetch people, friends, or persistent data are formatted. These requests follow the RPC specification that’s part of OpenSocial, and, while they’ve been part of t…
November 19th, 2008 | by Dan Holevoet | published in iGoogle
See your latest updates on MySpace, read and reply to messages in AOL Mail, and keep track of your Google Book Search Library.These are the first three gadgets on iGoogle to use OAuth, which is a privacy-preserving security standard that defines how a …