Google Developer Podcast Episode Five: Adam Sah on Google Gadgets

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Using iTunes?

The Google Gadget Ventures announcement was very exciting for us and the community. We couldn't wait to get Adam Sah of the Google Gadgets team to discuss Gadgets, and the new announcement.

Interview with Adam Sah on Google Gadget Ventures

What will you learn from this interview?

• What Google Gadgets actually are and how they compare to widgets and blidgets and blodgets and ....
• How there is a family of Gadgets. They aren't just for iGoogle!
• How you can develop Gadgets in HTML, Flash, Java applets, and more. After all, this is just iframes people.
• The security model with Gadgets
• The subtlety behind phishing and Gadgets
• The long tail of Gadgets, and how to share and promote your Gadgets
• How you can post Gadgets on your blog or website
• How we are in the second generation of Gadgets (not just a minimal view on your web app)
• What an appropriate amount of resources to put on Gadgets
• How to monetize your Gadgets
• Information about the Google Gadget Ventures program
• How to get going with the scratchpad in seconds
• How Mapplets are Gadget too
• How this is about real business (IBM and Salesforce.com)
• How to deal with high volume Gadgets, and how we are here to help.
• The role and timing of standardization of the gadget platforms

Read more about Google Gadgets, and check out the forum.

Start listening now

You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the show (click here for iTunes one-click subscribe).

News

The following are links that we mentioned in the podcast:

AppleScripting Google Desktop means that you can tell the Google Desktop application to do things for you via script. Boss around the system from your own applications and scripts.

The new Google Earth Outreach program has some tutorials such as showing you how to create KML from a spreadsheet.

The Google Mashup Gallery is a mashup itself, that allows you to add your mashup to the mix. Now, everyone will be able to find your Britney vs. Christina mashup!

Geotagged Picasa JSON/KML Output + Driving Directions = Instant Scenic Tours: If you were following the Google blogs yesterday, you would have heard that Picasa now gives you a sleek drag+drop interface for geotagging your photos, and that the Picasa Google data API now outputs the geotagged data using GeoRSS & GML elements. And if you were excited by all that news and immediately visited Picasa to try out the new feature, you might have noticed the big blue KML icon next to a "View in Google Earth" hyperlink. So Picasa now gives developers geotagged photo data both in KML output and the standard Google data API output formats, and that means we map developers have a lot of ways to start playing around with Picasa photos.

New drag-to-route driving directions in google maps - once you have a route, drag the blue line around to have it automatically re-route using your desired roads or intermediate destinations.

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Google Gadget Ventures

By Tom Stocky, Google Developer Programs

Good news for Google Gadget developers. We've just launched Google Gadget Ventures, a new pilot program for distributing grants and seed investments to gadget developers and gadget-related businesses. We're excited about the opportunity this will give developers to build even richer, more useful gadgets and get recognized for doing it.

The program will provide two kinds of funding. First, we'll invite promising gadget developers (individuals or businesses) to apply for $5,000 grants to fund further development. These are not loans or equity investments; they're simply grants for gadgets that already have a thriving user base and we think have potential for even more improvement. To be considered for a grant, your gadget needs to have more than 250,000 pageviews per week, and you need to provide a one-page proposal on how you'd like to improve your gadget. This is a no-strings-attached grant; we won't ask for repayment of any kind. We simply ask that you work on your project in good faith.

Secondly, the program will make $100,000 seed investments in companies that either start as a Google Gadget or have a large Google Gadget component. In order to be eligible for a seed investment, you must have received a $5,000 grant, and you must propose a plan for making your gadget financially sustainable.

If you're interested in creating your own Google Gadget, we have several tools that can help. The Google Mashup Editor has an option for instantly deploying your web app as a gadget. For Java programmers, Google Web Toolkit provides another good way to write a gadget or a full-featured AJAX app with a gadget component. The Google Data APIs and AJAX Feed API can help power your gadget with rich data sources. You can even add offline functionality using Google Gears.

We hope you find these tools useful for creating gadgets, and we're eager to hear what you think in the Google Gadgets discussion group.

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The Value of Google Gadgets

Post by Adam Sah, Google Gadgets Team

The past year has been very exciting for Google Universal Gadgets. We've seen developers create nearly 4000 gadgets that can be syndicated, enabling users to do anything from monitoring their water intake to checking their location on a map. These gadgets can be added to any page on the web, not to mention the Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop, Google Page Creator, and most recently the Windows Vista Sidebar and Mac OSX Dashboard.

In order to promote a more transparent and open ecosystem for gadget developers, we have introduced a new feature in the Gadgets For Your Webpage directory detailing the approximate number of gadget views each gadget receives per week. We expect that gadget developers (and potential gadget developers!) will be able to use this information to better understand the reach of their gadgets. A quick check will show that hundreds of gadgets are getting tens of thousands of pageviews each week -- and many are even getting millions.

And now, the technical stuff: These numbers are approximations, representing the number of times each gadget is rendered across all places Google Gadgets can be viewed. The pageview count is aggregated weekly to smooth out the normal daily fluctuations and we have filtered out automatic page refreshes. Individual gadget authors who want to know more specific information about their gadget's traffic should make use of the Google Analytics library.

As always, we're listening to your feedback on the Google Gadgets Developer Forum -- and if you want to get started writing gadgets, you can dive right into our API Docs. You can have your first one out the door before you know it.

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