Simon Willison’s Weblog

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292 items tagged “google”

2007

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