Google Developers Blog: March 2009

Google Narratives Series: BuddyPoke

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Google App EngineOpenSocialBuddyPoke!"Dave does all the technical stuff and I'm the technical artist."

Q: Tell us the story of how BuddyPoke was envisioned.

A: We'd always worked for other companies, and disliked the company politics, etc, and always dreamed of just going and doing our own thing. When we saw the huge success of Slide's slide shows on MySpace, we quit our jobs and started work on a 3D pets widget. Facebook apps and OpenSocial weren't live yet and our first project failed miserably because we completely lacked a distribution model with viral channels. Fast forward a bit, and Nintendo Wii is huge with everyone making miis and talking about avatars. There was Playstation Home and Second Life. Also, the Simpsons Movie was just about to released and allowed for you to "Simsponize" yourself. We thought about the 30+ minutes people were putting into customizing their avatars, without any way of doing any cool interaction with friends. We also thought about the interesting fact that most people who installed these types of console games did it mostly for character personalization or "dress up," rather than to actually play the game. Bottom line, we knew we had to do something about it.

Facebook apps then started to take off, and OpenSocial came out. We closely watched what worked and what didn't on Facebook by looking at usage charts of the top 200 apps. After a lot of trial and error, we applied our 3D backgrounds to some of the ideas and came up with a way of doing the 3D rendering in Flash. That's when we came up with BuddyPoke.

Q: Describe your implementation and why you decided on Google App Engine.

A: During the time that we were focused on researching app usage, we noticed that most apps were struggling with scalability. Their difficulties sounded vaguely familiar with our current implementation and we knew we needed to find a platform that would help us avoid the same issue, especially since we were working on the version for MySpace. The main thing here was timing with the release of Google App Engine and the announcement of OpenSocial. All of a sudden we found ourselves able to quickly roll out our app to the various OpenSocial sites without having to worry about scaling.

Q: Tell us about your overall development experience and any obstacles you have encountered along the way.

A: When Google App Engine first came out, the big learning curve was BigTable. Our data models were horrible. Then, after watching Ryan and Brett's talks at I/O, we redid everything and it's running well now. Our only concern is the organization of our code on AppSpot - everything runs on one AppSpot site. If we knew ahead of time of our success, we would have broken the code up in groups to make updating easier. Also, our main ask is XMPP support so that we can implement chat on App Engine.

One last thing...we're thrilled about the success of BuddyPoke. The barrier to entry is so low from a developer's perspective. We never imagined having 3D characters seen by so many people, without having to even think about the technology behind them or without even having to buy a Wii.
online submission form.Google I/ONing blogBy Christine Songco, Google Developer Team

Code Conversations Ep. 3 - Leslie Hawthorn on Google Summer of Code 2009

Monday, March 30, 2009

Google Summer of Code

Google's Open Source Programs OfficeGoogle Summer of CodeGNOME FoundationOpen Source Business ResourceHumanitarian FOSS Projecthttp://www.hawthornlandings.orgGoogle Codehttp://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=633DD2FE10E46955By Neel Kshetramade, Google Developer Programs

Custom Logos for Open Source Projects

Thursday, March 26, 2009

a project with its own logoChromiumgroups postBy Andy Chu, Software Engineer, Google Code

Toward an open web standard for 3D graphics

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

"Accelerated 3D graphics for the web"Khronos GroupMozillajoin KhronosBy Matthew Papakipos, Engineering Director and Vangelis Kokkevis, Software Engineer

Improvements to Google Checkout Module for osCommerce

Friday, March 20, 2009

Google CheckoutosCommercecode.google.comdocumentation

postfeedbackBy Ed Davisson, Google Checkout Team

Monster Mesh - A Google Chrome Experiment

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Google ChromeChrome ExperimentsMonster experiment

a lotGoogle Chrome Blogplease submit it,Google I/OBy Dean McNamee, Google Chrome Team

Updated GoogleBar features new UI and targeted sponsored results

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

By Adam Feldman, Google Developer Team

signing up for an AdSense accountAdSense publisher IDMaps API Blog postGoogleBar documentationLocal Search Control documentationCode Playground examplesAJAX APIMaps API

Google Narratives Series

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

By Christine Songco, Google Developer Programs

Google Code has highlighted many developers who've created applications using AppEngine, OpenSocial, AdSense, and Google Maps, however, we often forget to reflect on the stories of the people behind the code. In a series of upcoming blog posts we're calling Google Narratives, we'll be telling these stories to allow our developer community to interact and inspire each other to create or even improve existing projects. At last year's Google I/O, we met Dan Shahin of Hijinx Comics, whose creativity in using open source projects to build his business really makes him stand out. Dan agreed to chat with us and share his story. Thanks, Dan!

The story of Dan and how he came to own a comic book store.

At 28 years running, Hijinx Comics, is the oldest comic book store in San Jose, California. From both a personal and business perspective, Hijinx Comics holds a special place in Dan Shahin's life. At the early age of 11, Dan was hired at Hijinx, which was at the same location at the time but went by a different name. Dan continued to work there throughout high school, building his lifelong passion for comics. He left the comic store behind to attend college and later worked at a number of high tech jobs, gaining experience in UNIX systems administration, release management, and software engineering. But by the year 2000, still Dan couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing in his life. Hours of soul-searching revealed that the missing piece was the excitement and passion that he had once experienced when working with comics.

Dan decided to get in touch with the owner of the comic book store. It turned out to be perfect timing because the owner of the store was ready to sell. Dan picked up everything he owned and moved back to his old neighborhood to run the comic book store. He reopened the store as Hijinx Comics and expanded on the traditional business of collectible comics and novelty items with a new focus on graphic novels and books focused on entertainment reading.

Because of the amount of time Dan had worked with comics as a teenager, he had keen awareness of the pain points related to subscriptions and inventory. Drawing on these experiences, he developed a software suite to manage the subscriptions and inventory of his shop and of a brand new online bookstore. Best of all, he opensourced the whole offering to help other comic book stores alleviate the same issues. From there, a side business grew that involved him consulting and implementing a management system and hosting solution to other comic book stores across the nation.

Today, Dan's working on Ver.2 of his project while Ver.1 runs his current business needs. Below are some excerpts from our meeting with Dan.

Q: Tell me about your Google implementation and if there were any obstacles.

A: I use a lot of Google Code products to build my own open source comic shop management system. I use Google Checkout for my online bookstore ( http://www.comicbookshelf.com ) and did the level 2 integration myself in my custom LAMP application. I also make heavy use of Google Analytics [used to compare data from his own raw server logs], Charts API, Apps for Domains and thanks to last year's I/O, I'm getting into App Engine development as well as Gears, which is what really brought me to Google I/O. My web-based point of sale system uses all of the Gears APIs to bring down UI latency and to allow offline use, which are the two greatest sticking points to current adoption of similar systems. The documentation is well-written with one exception. It would be nice to have a cookbook section - that type is more helpful. More real-life examples in more detail, casual, reader friendly and a commonly used code section. They tend to have lots of detail and the high level can sometimes be fuzzy

Q: What effect have you seen with your customers as a result of the Google implementation?

A: Customers usually come to visit the store but can also log in and update their subscriptions on their own. There's a quicker checkout process since they do the rest of their browsing online. We have a book club where we collect email addresses for customers that buy certain novels online. Customers are also able to offer reviews or books we sell. These reviews are available both online and in the store. We keep track of this type of data in a CRM and based on it, can help recommend favorites and offer Netflix type suggestions.

We're excited to kick off the Google Narratives Series and plan to highlight more developers in our community so if you have a story like Dan's that you'd like to share with us, we're accepting submissions via our online submission form. Better yet, come tell us your story at Google I/O!

Google Friend Connect API Available in Labs

Thursday, March 12, 2009

By Mussie Shore, Product Manager - Google Friend ConnectGoogle Friend Connect API

Make it easy for every site owner to add Friend Connect to their site, regardless of their technical capabilities. We do this by letting site owners simply paste snippets of code into their websites' HTML to instantly provide social capabilities on their sites.

Be open by letting visitors control their own data and freely share it with sites and services as they see fit. Services that are currently integrated with Friend Connect include OpenID providers like Yahoo!, social network providers like Twitter, and update aggregators like Plaxo Pulse.

Use JavaScript APIs to integrate social flows and data directly within your page's markup, via the OpenSocial standard specification.

Use REST APIs to integrate your existing login systems, registered users, and your existing data with new social data and activities. These APIs are also part of the OpenSocial standard.

open source plugin samplescode.google.com

Google I/O

Code Conversations Episode 2 - Kevin Marks with Brad Neuberg

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

By Neel Kshetramade, Google Developer ProgramsPart 1Part 2Douglas Adams

Epeus EpigoneOpenSocialMicroformatsDojo projectcodinginparadise.orghere

Steve Souders: Life's Too Short, Write Fast Code (part 2)

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

By Steve Souders, Member of Technical StaffHigh Performance Web SitesEven Faster Web SitesGoogle I/OGoogle I/Oslides

Doug Crockford: JavaScript: The Good Parts

John Resig: Drop-in JavaScript Performance

Now Accepting Applications for Google Summer of Code 2009

Monday, March 9, 2009

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source TeamGoogle Summer of Code^TMaccepting applicationsGoogle Open Source Blog

Code Conversations Episode 1 - Chris DiBona on Google's Open Source Programs

Thursday, March 5, 2009

By Neel Kshetramade, Google Developer Programsopen source programsChrome ComicChromeAndroidGoogle Summer of CodeOpen Sources: Voices from the Open Source RevolutionOpen Sources 2.0: The Continuing EvolutionFLOSS weeklyEgo Food

Google Code University: New Materials and SIGCSE

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

By Andrea Held, Google Code UniversitySIGCSEGoogle Code UniversityDistributed Systems materialsother CS resourcesforum

Introducing Labs for Google Code

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Tom Stocky, Director, Google Developer ProductsGoogle CodeGoogle Code LabsApp EngineGoogle Web ToolkitAJAX Search APIMaps APIEarth APICalendar Data APIYouTube APIsGoogle Code LabsVisualization API termsContacts Data API termsPicasa Web Albums Data API termspolicyexperimentalSystem Status DashboardSOAP Search APIAJAX Search APIAJAX APIs blogGoogle Code Labs

Doug Crockford: JavaScript: The Good Parts

Monday, March 2, 2009

By Steve Souders, Member of Technical StaffJavaScript: The Good PartstheJSLintJSMinJSON

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Google Narratives Series: BuddyPoke

Code Conversations Ep. 3 - Leslie Hawthorn on Google Summer of Code 2009

Custom Logos for Open Source Projects

Toward an open web standard for 3D graphics

Improvements to Google Checkout Module for osCommerce

Monster Mesh - A Google Chrome Experiment

Updated GoogleBar features new UI and targeted sponsored results

Google Narratives Series

Google Friend Connect API Available in Labs

Code Conversations Episode 2 - Kevin Marks with Brad Neuberg

Steve Souders: Life's Too Short, Write Fast Code (part 2)

Now Accepting Applications for Google Summer of Code 2009

Code Conversations Episode 1 - Chris DiBona on Google's Open Source Programs

Google Code University: New Materials and SIGCSE

Introducing Labs for Google Code

Doug Crockford: JavaScript: The Good Parts

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