353 posts tagged “google”
2008
Doctype on Google Code. Alternative way of browsing Google Doctype—if you link to articles here instead of using the permalinks in the official version non-JavaScript user agents will be able to access the content you’ve linked to.
Google Doctype. So now we know what Mark Pilgrim’s been doing at Google... heading up a project to create an encyclopaedia of web development. The JavaScript UI for browsing it is a bit weird (though you do at least get real pages if you disable JavaScript in your browser).
Hey Google: any chance we can all build the social web together without requiring JavaScript?
— Me
We are happy to announce that the Google Contacts Data API now supports OAuth. This is our first step towards OAuth enabling all Google Data APIs. Please note that this is an alpha release and we may make changes to the protocol before the official release.
— Wei Tu
Google AJAX Search API: Flash and Server Side Access. Over a year after Google shot down their SOAP Search API, they’ve quietly released a JSON based one under the guise of supporting “Flash and other non JavaScript environments”. Comes with the strange requirement that an HTTP referer be sent with every request; the API key is optional.
Quotation search in Google News (via) Extremely impressive application of (I suppose) natural language processing in Google News—it now extracts quotations from news stories, even handling things like “he said” and “she said” and resolving them back to the speaker.
KML: A new standard for sharing maps. Google’s KML format, which is already supported by both Microsoft and Yahoo!’s map software, has been accepted under the wing of the Open Geospatial Consortium and is now an international standard.
OpenID for Google Accounts. Google App Engine integrates with Google’s user accounts, so Ryan Barrett (of Google) used it to build an idproxy.net style OpenID provider.
The Google App Engine model class, db.Model, is not the same as the model class used by Django. As a result, you cannot directly use the Django forms framework with Google App Engine. However, Google App Engine includes a module, db.djangoforms, which casts between the datastore models used with Google App Engine and the Django models specification. In most cases, you can use db.djangoforms.ModelForm in the same manner as the Django framework.
Running Django on Google App Engine. Django 0.96 is included, but you need to disable the ORM related parts and use the Google App Engine Bigtable interface instead.
Google App Engine. Write applications in Python using a WSGI compatible application framework, then host them on Google’s highly scalable infrastructure. The most exciting part is probably the Datastore API, which provides external developers with access to Bigtable for the first time.
An OpenSocial Foundation. “Today we are pleased to announce that Google is joining together with Yahoo! and MySpace in the creation of a non-profit foundation for the open and transparent governance of the OpenSocial specifications and intellectual property.” Good move; I’d personally love to see this happen with Google Gears.
Introducing the Google Contacts Data API. Brilliant! (and about time)—now there’s no excuse for asking your users for their Gmail username and password so you can import contacts from their address book. Yahoo! and Microsoft need to catch up on this one fast.
The real reason Google’s clicks are flat. Rich Skrenta explains that Google’s recent reduction of the clicable area in Adsense ads, while reducing click-throughs by 60%, will eventually balance out due to non-accidental click-throughs being worth more to advertisers.
Social Graph API. This is freaking awesome. Input one or more URLs to your profile pages and it returns a huge dump of crawled relationship data, based on XFN, FOAF and OpenID links. No API key required and it supports JSON callbacks so you can incorporate it in to a site without even needing to write any extra server-side code.
New feature: Blogger as OpenID provider (via) You can now enable your Blogger blog as an OpenID.
Poorly Macbook, ineffective error message design. Nat’s MacBook died the other day, throwing out some impressively meaningless error symbols. How exactly are you meant to Google for a circle with a line through it?
Google apps for your newsroom. How the LJ World team use online tools like Google Spreadsheet, Swivel, ManyEyes and Google MyMaps to collaborate with the newsroom and build data-heavy applications even faster.
Everyone applauds when Google goes after Microsoft's Office monopoly [...] but when they start to go after web non-profits like Wikipedia, you see where the ineluctible logic leads. As Google's growth slows, as inevitably it will, it will need to consume more and more of the web ecosystem, trading against its former suppliers, rather than distributing attention to them.
2007
OpenID and Google’s Blogger. Blogger gets it wrong by displaying a nickname derived from the OpenID URL (in Malcolm’s case, “blog”) instead of the user entered nickname.
EU: Microsoft’s Last Stand Against Google’s Acquisition of DoubleClick. Notable for some truly incomprehensible chartjunk from Microsoft.
David Airey: Google’s Gmail security failure leaves my business sabotaged (via) Gmail had a CSRF hole a while ago that allowed attackers to add forwarding filter rules to your account. David Airey’s domain name was hijacked by an extortionist who forwarded the transfer confirmation e-mail on to themselves.
Google Reader ruins Christmas (via) New sharing feature automatically reveals shared items to Gmail contacts, causing political rows.
ExtInfoWindow 1.0: Ajax powered, CSS customization. Finally, a semi-official way of creating customised info windows for the Google Maps API. You lose the default shadow but gain the ability to style the entire info window using CSS.
Negative numbers in the Google Chart API. Stuart has some ingenious tricks for showing negative values on Google Charts, based on transforming the data to positive values and then relabeling the axes.
Unfortunately, I was shocked, horrified and moderately surprised to see that nowhere is there any mention of how to encode negative numbers. Google, I appreciate you trying to help, and I understand that this grew out of needs for Google Finance, where stock prices can never dip below zero. But there's really not that much data out there in the real world that always exists solely above the origin.
Google Chart API (via) Really neat charting API from Google—simply encode your chart data and configuration options in to a URL and Google will serve up a nicely rendered PNG. No API key required. It’s like a documented version of the Google Groups rounded corners API.
The companies that couldn't beat Microsoft have all died, and evolution has resulted in three very different types of companies that are each immune to Microsoft's strategies in their own way. Yet all are still vulnerable to the same thing: a better product. For the end users, this is a good position for the industry to be in.
Blogger: OpenID commenting (via) I may be wrong, but I think this is the first Google property to support OpenID in any way.
google-axsjax (via) “The AxsJAX framework can inject accessibility enhancements into existing Web 2.0 applications using any of several standard Web techniques”—including bookmarklets and Greasemonkey. The enhancements conform to W3C ARIA, supported by Firefox 2.0 and later.