Moonwatcher

Google Developer Day Keynote Features Spanning Sync

In his opening keynote speech at Google Developer Day this morning, Google Engineering Vice President Jeff Huber called out Spanning Sync as an example of the kind of innovation being built by third-party developers in the Google ecosystem.

How cool is that? :-)

Google Launches Gears: Offline Access for On-Demand Apps

The Achilles' Heel of web applications has always been their lack of offline access. Sometimes users are offline, and sometimes applications themselves are. And when that happens, those applications become inaccessible—useless. But with the introduction of Google Gears (beta, natch) Google is aiming to solve that problem.

Robert Scoble sums it up nicely when he says:

What really just happened? The Web got a little further away from Microsoft’s platforms and Google revealed a little more about its platform dreams.

Gears engineers Aaron Boodman and Erik Arvidsson are less abstract in their post to the Gears API Blog:

It adds just enough to AJAX to make current web applications work offline.

Of course Gears isn't magic; web application developers must explicitly create or change their applications to use its functionality. To help them do so, Google has provided a tutorial, sample applications, and an entire site and forum to help developers get up to speed.

I wouldn't be surprised if the forthcoming partnership announcement between Google and salesforce.com were to include something about the latter company's planned use of Gears to provide its applications offline without requiring the embarrassingly off-message salesforce.com Offline Edition. [Update: I now have it on good authority nothing like this will be happening any time soon. -c]

Currently only Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6+ are supported, but Google is working on support for Safari. Why? Because Google rocks.

David Berlind has more details and the best coverage of Gears I've read so far. Things like this make me bitterly disappointed that Jon Udell now works for Microsoft. I'd really like to have read his unbiased analysis.

Attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston June 18-21

I'll be in Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in a few weeks and will be navigating the event with v2.0 of the, uh, event navigator I put together for SAPPHIRE.

It's incredibly useful to have a unified console containing not only the stuff the organizers hand out in printed form—a conference agenda, speaker bios, maps, etc—but also live feeds of blog posts, news items, photos, videos, and yes, even Twitter tweets. When I've gotten it all put together I'll publish the URL.

I Ask Not What I Can Do for Google...

...I ask what Google can do for me!

Last week I described what I think Google could learn from salesforce.com, namely how to better handle change management for their third-party developers. But since I'll be at the Googleplex tomorrow meeting privately with Larry, Sergey, and Erik lost in the teeming masses, I thought I'd collect my thoughts on what else I believe Google could be doing better.

Here are the first three that come to mind, in no particular order:

• Integrate Google Groups membership into the permissions system for Apps
  Someone has already gone to the trouble of creating a Google Group for the Enterprise Irregulars, but if I want to privately share a Google Calendar with those people I have to re-enter all 50-odd email addresses.
• Allow me to paste multi-line addresses into Maps
  Most addresses are formatted on multiple lines but if one cuts and pastes them into the search box on Google Maps, only the first line gets pasted.
• Let me sort emails by size in Gmail
  My Gmail account is almost full. I know I have hundreds of emails with attachments I could get rid of. If I could sort by size, I could free up hundreds of megs in seconds. Right now I have to hunt page by page looking for attachments.

But all of these gripes are from a user perspective. Tomorrow's event is all about developers. So as a developer, here's what I'd like most to see:

• Gmail API
  Just let me create, read, update, and delete contacts from my contact list. I want it. My customers want it. My iPhone needs it. :-)
• Better error messages
  Some of the error messages returned by the GData API can be misleading, uninformative, or even incorrect. Some even contain HTML markup, which isn't optimal.
• Relaxed rate limiting
  We make a fair number of API calls every day, and spend most of our time waiting for a response from Google. I assume there's some pretty serious rate limiting going on, which I'd love to see relaxed. Of course, if batch operations were implemented for the Calendar API I wouldn't care about rate limits, but one can only ask for so much. :-)
• PayPal-compatible integration for Google Checkout
  Like a lot of developers, I've integrated PayPal into my payment process. I'd like to be able to use Google Checkout if for no other reason than it accepts payment from countries PayPal doesn't. But I don't want to completely rewrite my payment integration code. If Google Checkout were plug-compatible with PayPal, I'd add it as an option.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of what I'd like to see from Google, rather just a random assortment of things that popped into my head when I started writing. I'd be interested to know what's on the wish lists of other Google users and developers.

Google Calendar Mobile

To the adulation of many (and the scorn of one) Google last week introduced a mobile interface for Google Calendar.

For those Google Calendar users willing not only to shell out for a mobile data plan but also put up with their phones' web browsers, this is a welcome addition. I myself much prefer my iPhone's built-in calendar application to any web app, mobile or not.

Of course, I don't, ah, have my iPhone yet and I've never actually seen its calendar app. But I'm sure it will rock. And I know it will sync with Google Calendar.

Quotes Out of Context

My quotes-only posts from SAPPHIRE were an interesting experiment, but reminded me that quotes out of context, particularly when juxtaposed to imply context, can lead their readers to draw false conclusions. To wit:

"With this insight, Dr Golombek and his colleagues decided to give their hamsters Viagra."
&mdashThe Economist, May 24, 2007

"Man barely survives hamster attack."
—The Register, May 30, 2007

The stories behind these quotess are interesting, but not exctly what you might have guessed from the quotes alone.

Somebody Write This Mashup

I find Twitter tedious, but if there were a way to feed it my current status from my Google calendars, I'd use it. I don't have time to write the tool that would do this, but here's the basic idea:

gCal/Twitter, uh, mashup

1. get my Google Calendar and Twitter usernames/passwords
2. periodically poll my selected (or public) gCal calendars and query for the current event(s):
   GET feedurl...?start-min=now&start-max=now
3. concatenate the events' titles together, slightly formatted (gcStatus), or if empty set gcStatus="Nothing"
4. query Twitter for current status (twStatus)
5. if gcStatus != twStatus, post gcStatus to Twitter

Update: Oops! It looks like someone has already written this. Cool!

What Google Could Learn From Salesforce.com

Phil Wainewright thinks that Perhaps Google will buy Salesforce.com after all, and cites Salesforce's experience providing reliable online services to business as something Google needs. While I would be extremely surprised by such an acquisition, I do agree that Google could learn a thing or two from Salesforce, notably how to better manage change for developers.

Both Salesforce and Google have rich API's, but Salesforce does a much better job of helping developers keep up with changes from one version to the next. In fact, Google doesn't even version its API's. Changes to Google's API's are rolled out with little or no notice to third-party developers, who are left to find out about important changes to the platform they're targeting only after the fact. Salesforce on the other hand does a very good job of thoroughly documenting changes and providing prerelease development environments that include those changes before they're made live.

I do want to say that the Google Calendar API support guys—especially Ryan Boyd and Lane LiaBraaten—have done a great job of responding to our comments, questions, and bug reports as we've developed Spanning Sync, and in several cases have gone far beyond the call of duty to help support us. Without their heroic help, we'd never have gotten to v1.0. But developer support can't rely on heroes—it must rely on process.

If Google and Salesforce do form a partnership that extends beyond simply integrating Google's collaboration applications into Salesforce's CRM applications, I hope some of the expertise Salesforce has developed in publishing and supporting web services API's rubs off on Google.

P.S. Last week in Austria I had the chance to ask SAP CEO Henning Kagermann several questions, including whether he considers Salesforce.com a competitor. He does. I had planned to follow up with a more intriguing question but ran out of time. That question was when and how SAP and Google might meet in the marketplace—as either partners or competitors. Given the recent Salesforce/Google rumors, that question seems even more germane now than it did last week. I wish I had asked it.

Google Developer Day Google Calendar

I've created a public Google Calendar for Google Developer Day on May 31 in Mountain View. You can add it to Google Calendar (by clicking here) or Apple iCal (by clicking here). You can also see the events of the day here:

I'll be there (wearing a Spanning Sync t-shirt). If you see me, please come say hello!

Back to Life

I think The Third Era of SAP may be the longest blog post I've ever written. Whew! With that out of the way, it's back to my actual life.

I ran today for the first time in a really long time, and it felt great. The weather was perfect—mid-70's (that's 23 or so to you Europeans) and sunny. Of course my body really didn't want to run, but I kept telling it that the discomfort of running beats the discomfort of too-tight clothes any day.

This evening after making dinner for myself and the boys, I'm rewarding myself with a glass or two of our new favorite wine: Condesa de Leganza Crianza. They say that travel broadens the mind ('til you can't get your head out of doors) but it's great to be home.