Google Developer Day 2007 – Advanced Topics on Google Data APIs

Posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 11:00 pm in gdd20007, google

  • GData gives access to Apps, Base, Blogger, Calendar, Code Search, Notebook, Picasa Web Albums, and Spreadsheets. List is growing.
  • A protocol for reading and writing structured data over HTTP based on REST. A lot less complex than SOAP.
  • Atom Publishing Protocol uses HTTP GET to get feed data, HTTP POST to add a new entry, HTTP PUT to edit and HTTP DELETE to delete an entry. Interesting.
  • Authentication works through ClientLogin (highly trusted applications) and AuthSub (for less trusted web applications).
  • AuthSub is works like Flickr’s authentication model as well.

Google Developer Day 2007 – New Features in the Google Maps API

Posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 9:45 pm in gdd20007, google

  • MarkerManager manages which makers to add depending on how large the viewport is. All markers are in memory, but that’s fine since markers are really small. Makes sure you don’t have 20,000 markers on a map of the whole US.
  • You can use map.addOverlay with GGeoXML, which uses KML, to overlay geo data onto maps (and Google Earth). They also support GeoRSS. He’s showing 6 lines of code overlaying interesting airplanes throughout the US.
  • They’re showing off Tile Layer Overlay, which allows you to overlay tiles on maps. Tiles are based on X, Y and Z (Z = Zoom). The example is of Stanford’s college campus map overlayed on top of the standard Google Map. Hot. You can set transparency on tiles too.
  • They use the Mercator Projection (must investigate this).
  • No way to easily say “I don’t have data outside of this boundary box”.
  • Driving directions just launched in the Google Maps API. Four lines of code to create a map with drections. Insanity. Also, allows you to load “Way Points” (ie. directions from Foo to Bar and then Bar to Baz) along with locales.
  • 10,000 requests per key per day.
  • They’re now embedding sponsored links directly into the maps. You’ll be able to enable Google Adsense on your maps. This is an opt-in feature. This would indicate that advertisers can now geo tag their advertisements. Advertisers can be blacklisted, ads are shown based on viewport and HTML content around the map.
  • Plans are in motion to base traditional AdSense ads shown outside of the map on the actual map dat.
  • All of the AdSense stuff above should launch sometime in June.

Google Developer Day 2007 – Enterprise Search APIs: Making Information Accessible at Work

Posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 8:48 pm in enterprise, gdd20007, google

  • The usual presenter technical difficulties to start things off.
  • An entire group devoted to enterprise was created in 2002 with over 7,000 customer of all shapes and sizes.
  • Search (Google Search Appliance), Geospatial (Maps and Earth), Collaboration (Google Appes).
  • You can post content to the Google Search Appliance (similar to Google Site Maps for the GSA).
  • GSA Feeds Protocol allows you to add meta data to each record, which can then be used to filter search results.
  • You can feed the content of the document into the index as well, which allows you to control the actual content that’s indexed. Interestingly, you can post binary data formats as well.
  • You can group content into “collections” which are based on URL patterns.
  • XSL stylesheets for search results (already knew this. You can also query via the GSA’s XML interface).
  • Based on URL patterns you can mark some content secure, and others unsecure. Along with an access parameter to restrict search results. Additionally, the search appliance can ping a callback URL via HTTP GET with the user’s cookies and show results based on response (401 = unauthorized, 200 = authorized).
  • The GSA’s now allow you to install “OneBox”’s (e.g. weather, FedEx, etc. data from Google) that shows dynamic information in search results. Triggered by a keyword and then grabs information from a provider URL based on that query. OneBox’s trigger an HTTP request to the provider URL, which returns XML that is then translated by your OneBox’s results XSL template. Insanely cool.
  • GSA’s can do up to 30,000,000 documents and beyond with custom setups.

Google Developer Day 2007 – YouTube API

Posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 6:59 pm in gdd20007, google, youtube

  • YouTube API philosophy is to get YouTube everywhere, give flexibility, maintain some consistency of overall YouTube user experience and, respect developers and content creators.
  • Just showed a new “beta” video player that has screenshots scrolling along the bottom of featured videos.
  • http://youtube.com/rssls for more information on their RSS feeds.
  • Offer REST and XML-RPC API’s. XML-RPC returns REST’s XML response escaped as an XML-RPC data structure. Seems a bit hacky to me.
  • Standard feed responses include thumbnail images.
  • Working on a new set of API’s that conform to the GData API standards. They’re investigating open/upload/write functionality. New search calls, filtertering, etc.
  • They’re working on adding ability to show a specific frame number as opposed to whatever thumbnail they give you by default. No release date.
  • They’re working on adding more programs where users can create businesses around their content.
  • Also working on allowing users to do seeking, etc. from the API (ie. start the video from a specific start point). No planned support for allowing JavaScript to control the player.
  • For the foreseeable future they do not plan on allowing access to the raw videos (e.g. usurp the embedded player).
  • Lots of plans for extensive statistics for YouTube video viewing (e.g. how much of a video was watched, who’s watching, etc.).
  • They are working on an upload API, which is currently focused on device manufacturers and not necessarily 100% open to all (what about GData?).
  • Search only allows searching meta data, but implicit data (e.g. voice recognition) isn’t searchable. It doesn’t sound like they’re working on it, but Google being Google you should expect this (didn’t they just launch face recognition for image search?).
  • Geo tagging and deep geo tagging is on their roadmap. They’re going to be adding steps to the upload process that should allow better information. Once there’s enough of that data they’ll be exposing it.
  • Doesn’t exactly sound like they’re working on editing, but that they’re interested in it.
  • Google Analytics? Haven’t done any work to allow such things, but the hope is that stats will be available from them and exposed publicly.

Projects

  • Ready-to-use location infrastructure for developers.

    SimpleGeo

    Ready-to-use location infrastructure for developers.

  • Consistent, predictable Twitter avatars backed by an enterpise CDN.

    tweetimag.es

    Consistent, predictable Twitter avatars backed by an enterpise CDN.

Open Source Projects

Categories