OpenID104 items tagged “google”
Hey Google: any chance we can all build the social web together without requiring JavaScript?
— Me 
13th May 2008, 1:49 pm
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 
26th April 2008, 10:15 am
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. 
22nd April 2008, 7:16 pm
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. 19th April 2008, 7:22 am
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. 14th April 2008, 6:36 pm
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. 
9th April 2008, 1:09 am
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.
— Google App Engine docs 8th April 2008, 1:48 pm
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. 8th April 2008, 1:15 pm
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. 
8th April 2008, 7:25 am
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. 
25th March 2008, 2:51 pm
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. 6th March 2008, 11:29 pm
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. 4th March 2008, 4:34 am
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. 
3rd February 2008, 10:34 pm
New feature: Blogger as OpenID provider (via) You can now enable your Blogger blog as an OpenID. 18th January 2008, 1:38 pm
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? 13th January 2008, 11:31 pm
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. 7th January 2008, 9:24 pm
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.
— Tim O'Reilly 1st January 2008, 11:29 am
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. 30th December 2007, 10:35 am
EU: Microsoft’s Last Stand Against Google’s Acquisition of DoubleClick. Notable for some truly incomprehensible chartjunk from Microsoft. 27th December 2007, 12:26 pm
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. 26th December 2007, 12:16 pm
Google Reader ruins Christmas (via) New sharing feature automatically reveals shared items to Gmail contacts, causing political rows. 25th December 2007, 2:59 pm
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. 15th December 2007, 12:22 pm
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. 8th December 2007, 9:03 am
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.
— Marty Alchin 7th December 2007, 4:47 pm
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. 6th December 2007, 5:37 pm
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.
— Ian Hickson 6th December 2007, 3:43 pm
Blogger: OpenID commenting (via) I may be wrong, but I think this is the first Google property to support OpenID in any way. 30th November 2007, 7:10 pm
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. 14th November 2007, 5:18 pm
Gmail Greasemonkey API (via) The new version of Gmail includes API hooks for Greasemonkey script authors. The documentation is by Mark Pilgrim, author of Greasemonkey Hacks. 7th November 2007, 10:38 am
Figuring out OpenSocial
So it’s out, and lots of people are talking about it, but I’m still trying to work out exactly what it is. There seem to be two parts to it: a standardised set of GData APIs for accessing lists of friends and their activities (like the Facebook news feed) and a bunch of JavaScript APIs for enabling developers to write hostable widgets and “container sites” to embed those widgets. [... 289 words]
“The web is fundamentally better when it’s social, and we’re only just starting to see what’s possible when you bring social information into different contexts on the web,” said XXXX.
— Google's unreleased OpenSocial Press Release 31st October 2007, 6:39 pm
Marc Andreesen on Open Social. Marc describes it as an open standard for implementing Facebook style “containers” that other applications can live in. My initial assumption that it was an implementation of the Social Graph paper ideas was incorrect. 31st October 2007, 4:58 pm
Google Announces the OpenSocial API. I doubt the similarity between this and Brad Fitzpatrick’s social graph paper are a coincidence—what IS impressive is that he only joined Google a couple of months ago. 31st October 2007, 4:34 pm
Mailplane (via) A commercial OS X Gmail client built around a site-specific browser. 25th October 2007, 7:57 am
The password anti-pattern. What I don’t understand is why Google / Yahoo! / other webmail providers haven’t just deployed a simple OAuth-style API for accessing the address book. Sites have been scraping them for years anyway; surely it’s better to offer an official API than continue to see users hand out their passwords? 12th October 2007, 9:25 am
BarCampLondon3. 24th-25th of November in Google’s London offices (by Victoria train station). The last BarCamp London was a blast—I’m really looking forward to this. 10th October 2007, 5:20 pm
Google Maps, HTML version. Google’s mostly undocumented accessible version of Google Maps. Robin Christopherson demonstrated this yesterday at FOWA. 4th October 2007, 9:31 am
Google GMail E-mail Hijack Technique. Apparently Gmail has a CSRF vulnerability that lets malicious sites add new filters to your filter list—meaning an attacker could add a rule that forwards all messages to them without your knowledge. 27th September 2007, 10:29 am
Firefox 3 Antiphishing Sends Your URLs To Google. Stories like this crop up every now and then, but no one ever seems to mention that the Google Toolbar has been doing this since it was released (more than five years ago) provided you have PageRank display turned on. 25th September 2007, 11:04 pm
Google To “Out Open” Facebook On November 5. “Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.” 21st September 2007, 11:23 pm
Google Maps API gets clickable polylines and polygons. Interesting explanation of how they optimised calculating the distance to the nearest point on a polyline. 8th September 2007, 12:58 pm
XFML (via) Throwing the new home for the XFML specification some Google juice; the domain name got nabbed by a squatter. 30th August 2007, 10:27 pm
Ganeti (via) New from Google (developed in the Zurich office): virtual server management tool designed to “facilitate cluster management”, built on top of Xen. 30th August 2007, 9:51 pm
Google Web Toolkit: Towards a better web. Good overview of why GWT exists, but I take exception to the title: requiring JavaScript to even display something does not make the web “better”. 29th August 2007, 8:21 pm
An update on Google Video feedback. Google are now offering a real refund to everyone who bought a video, and are letting people keep the Google Checkout credit as well. Purchased videos will keep working for six months. 21st August 2007, 7:54 am
Brighton geek venues. Nat’s latest project: a neat Google Maps mashup listing venues for geek events in Brighton, managed using Google MyMaps to edit a KML file. 16th August 2007, 1:38 am
By picking up its marbles and going home, Google just demonstrated how completely bizarre and anti-consumer DRM technology can be.
— Ken Fisher 14th August 2007, 12:41 pm
In an effort to improve all Google services, we will no longer offer the ability to buy or rent videos for download from Google Video [...] After August 15, 2007, you will no longer be able to view your purchased or rented videos.
— Google Video e-mail 11th August 2007, 8:33 am
Microformats in Google Maps (via) No doubt thanks to the influence of Kevin Marks. 31st July 2007, 11:36 pm
tesseract-ocr. Open source OCR, sponsored by Google. I just sat in on a talk on this at OSCON and the complexity of the problem is pretty incredible. 26th July 2007, 8:23 pm
YouTube Scalability Talk. Kyle Cordes’ notes on a Google Tech Talk on scaling YouTube by Cuong Do. 14th July 2007, 10:26 pm
Google Translate (beta). Google’s beta translator based on statistical analysis of things like the United Nations corpus. I have no idea how long this has been available; it isn’t linked from their homepage. 3rd July 2007, 4:43 pm
Google Health Advertising Blog: My opinion and Google’s (via) A follow up to the post I linked to earlier. 1st July 2007, 9:22 pm
Does negative press make you Sicko? (via) Google’s Health Advertising Blog encourages the healthcare industry to buy ads against Sicko as part of an “issue management campaign” to help “educate” the public. Creepy. 30th June 2007, 6 pm
My Google Tech Talk on OpenID. I gave this extended and improved version of my “Implications of OpenID” talk at Google on Monday. Fast turnaround on the video! 
28th June 2007, 8 am
google-diff-match-patch (via) Robust algorithms to perform the operations required for synchronizing plain text, in Java, JavaScript and Python. 9th June 2007, 6:15 pm
Semi-synchronous replication for MySQL (via) Google’s patch for MySQL which enables more reliable master-slave replication (a transaction isn’t committed until at least one slave has replicated the data). 5th June 2007, 10:07 pm
Google Gears DB Abstractions. Here come the ORMs. 4th June 2007, 8:54 am
Cross Domain Frame Communication with Fragment Identifiers. Google are using this crazy iframe/fragment trick for their new Mapplets API. 31st May 2007, 2:15 pm
Apollo will include Google Gears technology. Looks like Google really worked on the partnerships for this one. 31st May 2007, 8:30 am
Dojo Offline on Google Gears. “The great news is that the Dojo crew were in the loop wrt this project, and Brad has ported Dojo Offline to use Google Gears as the base platform.” 31st May 2007, 8:28 am
RSS Bling goes Offline with Google Gears. Google Gears is Google’s new offline JavaScript framework. Dion Almaer (a Google employee) has a nice example of code using Google Gears on Ajaxian. 31st May 2007, 8:27 am
The Google Maps Street View team? They’re posing outside the Googleplex so I’m guessing this is the team that built it. 30th May 2007, 12:29 pm
Howto: Google Maps Street View outside US. Add “&gl=us” at the end of the URL to avoid the evil geo IP restriction and play with Google’s latest toy. 30th May 2007, 7:40 am
Top XSS exploits by PageRank. Yahoo!, MSN, Google, YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook all feature. 29th May 2007, 10:07 pm
Google Image Search does faces (via) The undocumented imgtype=face parameter. Kind of creepy. 28th May 2007, 8:08 pm
The Oxford Guide free WiFi plotted on Google Maps. The guide offers a geocoded Atom feed which can be directly plotted on a Google Map. 26th May 2007, 9:55 am
A whole new experience for Google Analytics. I absolutely cannot wait to get my hands on the new interface. Maybe I’ll finally be able to find the search referrals page! 8th May 2007, 9:09 pm
Introduction and Yahoo! Pipes. The official Google Maps API blog describes how to plot KML output from Yahoo! Pipes. 3rd May 2007, 10 pm
Seven JavaScript Techniques You Should Be Using Today (via) Sound advice from Dustin Diaz, who is now a Googler. 24th April 2007, 8:20 am
Google AJAX Feed API (via) Simple cross-domain proxy to allow JavaScript to access any publically addressable syndication feed, with the same logic as Google Reader providing normalisation. 18th April 2007, 5:29 pm
Google Reader Theme. Jon Hicks’ beautiful alternative skin for Google Reader, installable as a user stylesheet for various browsers. 16th April 2007, 10:03 pm
Google My Maps: Bodeans. I’ve been talking about how useful a simple tool for creating custom maps would be for ages... looks like Google beat me to it. Here’s one I created showing the location of Bodeans, an excellent Kansas-style BBQ joint in Soho, London. It’s a shame the URLs suck. 5th April 2007, 5:40 pm
How to beat Google, part 1. Rick Skrenta with 12 steps to taking on Google in the search engine space, including some great insights in to smart UI design. 27th March 2007, 12:02 am
New Open Source Utility Library for the Google Maps API (via) Google are taking a hybrid approach to development on their Maps API—an open source utility library layered on top of their closed source, obfuscated core code. 23rd March 2007, 9:09 pm
My photos tagged “cheese” on a Google Map. You can paste a Flickr GeoRSS feed directly in to the Google Maps query box. 23rd March 2007, 1:55 am
KML and GeoRSS support added to the Google Maps API. Since Flickr can output GeoRSS, this means you can now plot your Flickr photos on a Google Map (if you’re so inclined). 23rd March 2007, 1:03 am
Two visions. It looks like Mark Pilgrim is going to be joining Hixie at Google. 20th March 2007, 8:32 am
Google Video: How do I enter transcripts? Neat feature of Google Video I hadn’t seen before: you can upload timestamped transcripts of your videos. Anyone seen a video that uses these? 12th March 2007, 10:44 pm
Google Seattle conference on scalability. Google are hosting a conference on scalability in Seattle on June 23rd. They’ve just put out the CfP. 10th March 2007, 4:37 pm
The bright side: web spam is an evolutionary force that pushes relevance innovations such as trustrank forward. Spam created the market opportunity for Google, when Altavista succumbed in 97-98. Search startups should be praying to the spam gods for a second opportunity.
— Rick Skrenta 15th February 2007, 11:15 am
Add OpenSearch to your site in five minutes. OpenSearch is easy. DeWitt demonstrates how you don’t even need a site search engine to implement it if you take advantage of Google’s site: operator. 9th February 2007, 12:52 am
This site may harm your computer. Tom Dyson’s personal weblog was flagged by Google as hosting malicious software, without any clue as to what the problem was. Sure looks like a false positive to me. 5th February 2007, 9:26 am
On Space Art in Sebastopol... Awesome. Our giant mosaic space invaders are going to show up on Google Earth! 22nd January 2007, 10:44 pm
Designing Google Reader’s trends. “But beyond the visualization, this serves as a good example of collecting and understanding the ambient information that flows through our digital lives.” 15th January 2007, 12:53 am
Details of Google’s Latest Security Hole. For a brief while you could use Blogger Custom Domains to point a Google subdomain at your own content, letting you hijack Google cookies and steal accounts for any Google services. 14th January 2007, 1:36 pm
MacFUSE: FUSE for Mac OS X. Mac support for user-space custom file systems, API compatible with those already written for Linux. Amit Singh runs kernelthread.com; I hadn’t realised that he had moved to Google. 12th January 2007, 9:47 am
Beginning of the end for open web data APIs? Google just ditched their SOAP API in favour of a crippled Ajax widget. What are the implications for other free-as-in-beer APIs? 20th December 2006, 12:44 am
Google Code gets wikis and file downloads. Someone finally wrote a project wiki that stores its pages inside the Subversion repository. 16th December 2006, 12:35 pm
Google’s own cornershop. Google groups has an undocumented API for generating rounded corners. 14th December 2006, 7:34 pm
Making GWT Better. Explains the philosophy behind GWT. It’s all about the tools! 12th December 2006, 5:53 pm
GWT 1.3 Release Candidate is 100% Open Source. At least you can see how the code generator works now. 12th December 2006, 5:50 pm
Google Mondrian. Internal Google application, powered in part by Django! 1st December 2006, 11:27 am
Good Agile, Bad Agile. Includes interesting insight in to Google development processes. 27th September 2006, 3:10 pm
Chris Shiflett: Google XSS Example (via) UTF-7 is a nasty vector for XSS. 24th December 2005, 5:21 pm
Google Base is interesting
I’m still trying to get my head around Google Base. Here’s a brain-dump of my thinking so far. First, some links. [... 364 words]
Dissecting the Google Firefox Toolbar
Google have finally released a Firefox version of the Google Toolbar, with some nice praise for XUL in to the bargain. Of course, the most interesting part of the toolbar from a geeky point of view is the bit that queries Google’s servers for PageRank. Sure enough, if you download the google-toolbar.xpi file, unzip it, then unzip the google-toolbar.jar file within there’s a file called pagerank.js with all of the juicy details.
[... 234 words]
Fighting RFCs with RFCs
Google’s recently released Web Accelerator apparently has some scary side-effects. It’s been spotted pre-loading links in password-protected applications, which can amount to clicking on every “delete this” link — bypassing even the JavaScript prompt you carefully added to give people the chance to think twice. [... 353 words]
Google cruft
New Google feature: Google Movies. Displays aggregated movie reviews (like Rotten Tomatoes), looks up local movie times based on your zip code saved in Google Local (more evidence of the fabled Google cookie), and even handles recommendations. [... 120 words]
Google Maps and XSL
I’ll probably write more on this later, but it seems that Google Maps is using XSL. I spotted it loading the following pages while sniffing its activity with LiveHTTPHeaders: [... 174 words]
Maps released. Google Maps Safari support is being worked on. 8th February 2005, 12:03 pm
Google Search: spong monkeys. I’m second. Rock! 25th February 2004, 3:32 pm
Google conspiracy theories
Microdoc News have a poorly researched story suggesting that Google have been engineering their search results to favour their own properties: [... 582 words]
