Google added another interesting piece to its API stack. Now with the Google AJAX Language API, you can translate and detect the language of blocks of text within a webpage using only Javascript.
The language API is designed to be used to translate and detect languages on the fly when off line translations are not available.
I use Google Reader and Google Notebook on a daily basis. I read and consume feeds from 300+ blogs daily. I scan, read, visit and participate in many of the posts.
I then either tag the blog entries in my Google Reader.
Or I visit the blog and highlight some or all of the text and add to my Google Notebook.
I keep huge amounts of information in both of these.
With the combination of tagging in Google Reader and organizing in notebooks in Google Notebook and keep track of meaningful information.
Both give me a search tool to then pull this information up at anytime.
What a great database.
Google released a new update for the Google Chart API. It allows you to create maps with specific data areas based upon what you pass.
You can highlight states, countries and other elements and display summary or other data regarding those elements.
A nice feature added to the API. The have a lot of features hitting the pavement lately across their web applications / API.
I wrote earlier about Youtube's new API. I am really happy they updated it. It has several features that I feel are key to using their platform.
However in thinking more about it and reading other posts about it I realize their approach and openness is the real gem.
Youtube understands the basic 2.0 concept that user activity should not have to occur on your site. This is a very tough concept for some players to understand.
Key player still think that they can force or entice customers to join their social network, use their tools, and participate in activities only on their site.
Understanding that you need a quality site presence as well as a quality presence on the open Internet.
Google and Youtube gets this and made their API refelect this. You don't have to upload, search, and view videos on Youtube.
Youtube finally has reworked their API to allow for uploading of videos. This was a huge problem in integrating YouTube in Social Media Campaigns.
Here are some of the things you can do with the YouTube Data API now:
The upload was the biggest addition for me. It is something that I have wanted for a while now.
However the cool new chrome JavaScript player is pretty awesome too. You can really customize and embed a new user video player experience in any site.
I have been getting happier with the contact management tools available in Gmail...and some of the integration with other Google Applications.
I would like to see more social networking and social graph management tools, like their recent social graph api release.
Now Google has added another simple, yet powerful tool to their API arsenal. A common contact list has helped power applications like Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Calendar, and with the launch of the Google Contacts Data API, you can access this list with other external applications.
Based on AtomPub, the Contacts API can be used to read, create, edit, and delete contact information stored with Google.
Learn the details from an announcement post on the Google Data APIs blog.
Google finally launched the reborn Jotspot as Google sites. It is slick and elegant and acts as I thought it would as a Google App.
It seamlessly integrates with other Google Apps.
However it seems to be only launched for Google Apps? Which is continuing the confusion about the separation between my Google Apps for My Domain and my FREE primary Google Account which I use heavily.
In addition it isn't available in my current Google Apps for my domain. I had to sign up for a new account with a domain I had laying around to get at it.
A little frustrating, but I am still excited to play with. I will be working with it and see what I can get done.
Wooohoo!!
I was just playing with the new Google Talk Chatback Widget. It allows you to allow anonymous chats from your web page for your customers and site visitors.
I was just researching using this last week for a client who was asking for it and didn't much care for the Boldchat they were using.
It is a great FREE or low cost web site chat and support module. Just yet another innovative use for the Google Platform. I use the Google services for so much these days.
I went ahead and added to my web site, since I leave my Gmail open all day and live in my Google Desktop it was a natural fit to have on my blog.
Google just release a social graph API out into the wild.
Google crawls the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people's accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships that were discovered from all the XFN and FOAF.
XF stands for XHTML Friends Network which is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks by utilizing a simple rel="" property for the hyperlink.
FOAF stands for The Friend of a Friend project and is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.
This is definitely a great approach for Google to take to continue bringing the web together. I see a big problem with their not being enough defined content out there on the Internet for this to be useful quite yet. It appears people like Plaxo are working to solve this with their Plaxo Pulse.
Hopefully this is the beginning of Google integrating more social network relationship controls into their gmail contacts, docs and user controls.
Nice example of how Web Application Development should occur.
I really like Google approach to extending their applications beyond their core features and encouraging research and development by the masses.
I was just reading a post on the Official Gmail Blog: Gmail Greasemonkey API issue. They outline how they have updated Gmail Javascript to load in an iframe.
They talk about how this change may create some side effects in how some scripts work.
They fully embrace the fact that Greasemonkey is a widely adopted method of extending applications, including most of the core Google Platform Applications.
I just am really impressed how they allow and even work with the masses of hackers and coders out there, who are wanting to get the most out of applications they use.
This type of open research and development and social programming is great, and I feel it is one of the reasons why Google continues to stay at #1.
Came across a post of Google Blogoscoped today on Google testing using Google Gears for offline Google Docs access.
This would be huge in taking more market share from Microsoft Office. It would allow users to work with documents much in the same way they do with the desktop Microsoft version.
They seem to be only testing it out right now and will be initially making it only available for Google Docs and not for spreadsheets or presentation.
This is something I would us a lot, been enjoying it for my Google Reader.
Ever wish you could show your ads to a specific group like women aged 25-34? Want to see how your ads perform with certain demographic groups and then adjust your bids accordingly?
Google is introducing a new demographic bidding feature from AdWords. Demographic bidding helps you display your ads to specific gender and age group audiences on some sites in the Google content network, giving you more control over who your audience is and greater insight into how your ads perform with certain demographic groups.
They will start testing this feature over the next few weeks with a selected group of advertisers in the U.S. and U.K.
There are two ways you can use demographic bidding:
The Youtube team recently release a couple of new features for the Youtube video platform.
They added: New View for Videos tab which improves the video browsing experience by fully exposing the search options on the videos page. This makes it easier to find what you're looking for quickly
Also Added a display of the most recent comments you have made on YouTube videos, choose the new 'My Recent Comments' setting on your profile page. On your channel page, users can also click 'View All' to see all comments you have ever made.
Google features rolling out all over the place
I wish Google would go ahead and make their move with Jotspot. I have a Jotspot account, but I forget about it when using all my other Google Applications.
Hopefully soon they get Jotspot integrated withe the rest of the Google Universe.
A Wiki environment will really tie everything together.
Had a new idea on how to use the Google Platform today. Reading so much about micro-blogging and twitter these days in the blogosphere.
Was reading how non-profits can use micro-blogging and how it could be used in disaster and emergency scenarios until I read how Twitter failed during the MacWorld conference.
So I was building upon an old idea on how you could use Google Notebook for micro-blogging and I thought even better you could use Google Spreadsheets.
You could build a widget or firefox add-on for micro-blogging and it would store all your entries for a day in a single spreadsheet.
This way you would have ownership of all your data and neatly organized and searchable.
Then using the Google Data API you could syndicate and share your feeds and existing Google Data Widgets and Code to access your feeds.
There would need to be some sort of registry of users and it would have the path and address to get your latest set of entries and offer all the features of Twitter, etc.
Just a thought on how to build a micro-blogging on the shoulders of giants.
I use the "Google Platform" to help me build and evolve my central "content platform". For either one project or across all of them.
I too am a software developer so I approach very similar.
I have been using Google Platform to organize and publish my thoughts for some time now. I have wanted to start blogging on how I do this and work to organize my thoughts in a way I can share with others. I was reading Development Approaches to Writing?, by Fred Stutzman today about his development process approach to writing. So let me start with a basic post about this and I will work to refine.
Everything starts in Google Notebook, because I can harvest from a web page or blog with just a right click and it keeps the reference to the original piece. I can also just capture my own thoughts as I am surfing using my firefox add-in as well.
I can then organize these "notes" into notebooks by relevancy. I can further refine and handle the evolution by scripts using the Google Notebook API.
Then as information and throughts mature I migrate to Google Docs with a simple right click in Google Notebook.
Once in Google Docs I can refine more formally and with the assistance of others if necessary through collaboration.
Then I can also organize data in spreadsheets and evolve aspects into presentations.
From there I can publish to blogger, PDF, a book or whatever publishing format I wish.
I like the Google Platform because of how the applications compliment and work together, however the API is the biggest piece that allows me to work with things programmatically using scripts.
It is fun finding new Google Features. I never really know when they come out, but when I find them they are new to me so I am blogging about them.
I was reading Google News as I do daily and noticed a little + sign next to one of my Recommended for Kin Lane articles.
So I click on it and I get a news video from Youtube related to the news article.
Definitely blurring the lines between what I think of as traditional news journalism and new media.
Definitely an important view of how important a Universal Online and Social Media Marketing Strategy can be.
The more content you have on a topic the more prominence and exposure you can get.
So when you publish an article, publish related photos, videos, and any other related content you can find.
All the players are really cross referencing everything.
All right I have a couple of new Google Features for Google Docs tonight. In addition to Taking an ordered list in Google Docs and highlighting and publish as a Google Presentation, I would like another one:
I am working about 40+ documents in Google Docs right now. I would like to share them all with someone and have them help me work on some and generally allow them to acess them.
So what do I have to do? I have to go through each Google Doc and share it with this contact.
It would be much easier if I could just share them with a group.
I have been using Google Notebook pretty heavily. I use it for about 80% of my data gathering in combination with the Google Notebook Firefox Add-on.
I have permanent and temporary Google Notebook Folders for different purposes. I will export a notebook from a Google Notebook to Google Docs using the export feature available in the top right corner under tools.
It really helps me internally publish gathered information to allow it to be more refined using Google Docs. Also now I can collaborate with someone on the refinement.
A new Google Docs feature along the same lines that would be nice is:
Taking an ordered list in Google Docs and highlighting and publish as a Google Presentation.
I have created an ordered list in a Google Doc representing some topic, and I think...."This would make a nice presentation."
It would be nice to highlight an ordered list and right clicking and be able to publish as Google Presentation.
It would take each <> in the <> and make a slide with a caption of the text within the <>
Then I would save a great deal of time extending a Google Doc or a portion of the Google Doc as a Google Presentation.
Just a thought on a new Google Feature, thanls for making it happen.
