I had the pleasure of being at Google I/O this morning, the impressively well run and generous celebration of developers that Google has hosted here in San Francisco for the past two years.
Eric Schmidt kicked things off with the message of "The Time is Now" (to finally realize the dream of the Web as the ultimate programming platform). Schmidt was followed by a number of senior Google engineering lieutenants as well as a few token engineering executives from companies like Mozilla and Palm.
There was a lot of attention paid to how far the browser has come in terms of speed, as well as the promise that HTML 5 holds for both users and developers.
The portion of the keynote most relevant to readers of this blog was the launch of "Google Web Elements" - an attempt to bring the same embed / cut and paste programming that is available for YouTube to other Google products. Yes, this is what the rest of the world calls a "widget."
And no, I am not changing this blog's name to "Sexy Web Element."
Specifically, Google is now exposing embeddable JavaScript snippets for the following Google Products:
- Calendar
- Conversation / Commenting (watch out Disqus, JS-Kit?)
- Custom Search (neat because it isolates the host domain and other domains that you choose, watch out Lijit?)
- Maps
- News
- Presentations (watch out Slideshare?)
- Spreadsheets
- YouTube
Here's an example of the commenting widget:
And here's an example of the custom search widget:
For more on Google Web Elements, see Technologizer.
