Tag Archives: Google

Google gadgets and Yahoo widgets

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In 2003, Konfabulator, a startup, released a paid software that consisted of cool standalone applets that did all sorts of stuff from telling the time, to monitoring stock market prices, to displaying your calendar. Mid-2005, Yahoo acquired the startup, and then offered Konfabulator as freeware, both for Mac OS X and Windows. They call it now widgets. In 2006, Google introduced Google gadgets, a precursor has been the side panels in the Google Desktop.

Google Gadgets are interactive mini-applications that can be placed anywhere on your desktop or on your iGoogle page to show you new email, weather, photos and personalized news. Other gadgets include the clock, calendar, scratch pad, todo list and many more. Google Gadgets are made by users that offer cool and dynamic content and can be placed also on any page on the web.

All Desktop gadgets use the Gadget API. They can also use core JavaScript features and the XMLHttpRequest class. Windows-only Desktop gadgets can include native Windows libraries and use selected Search APIs to take advantage of Google Desktop search features.

Google offers a Desktop SDK that has everything you need to write Google Gadgets and to integrate desktop searching into your applications. A development forum, a FAQ webpage and a hall of fame are available to provide valuable feedback on creating gadgets.

Google gadgets can also been used in Lively, a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs and that was released as beta on July 10th, 2008. Lively gadgets provide rich media and interaction capabilities to users.

A great site for gadgets, widgets and SEO is Seoish, run by Patrick Sexton alias Feedthebot.

Google Desktop et iGoogle

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Google Desktop

J’ai installé aujourd’hui Google Desktop sur mon portable. Google Desktop permet de faire des recherches locales aussi facilement que sur le Web et de trouver et de lancer des applications et des fichiers en quelques clics.  Google Desktop permet d’ajouter des plug-ins Google Gadgets pour personnaliser son bureau et pour consulter les actualités, la météo et bien d’autres informations. Pour aller un pas plus loin, on peut installer sa page d’accueil personnalisée avec iGoogle.

Il y a un blog officiel de Google Desktop qui constitue une source très riche d’informations concernant Google Desktop.

Social Web

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OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google, and released November 1, 2007 (version 0.6). Based on HTML and JavaScript, as well as the Google Gadgets framework, OpenSocial includes four APIs for social software applications to access data and core functions on participating social networks :

  • General JavaScript API
  • People and Friends : people and relationship information
  • Activities : publishing and accessing user activity information
  • Persistence (simple key-value pair data for server-free stateful applications

OpenSocial is currently in alpha development, version 0.8 was released on May 28, 2008. Applications implementing the OpenSocial APIs will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them. OpenSocial is rumored to be part of a larger social networking initiative by Google code-named “Maka-Maka”. An Apache incubator open source project, Shindig, was launched in December, 2007, to provide a reference implementation of the OpenSocial standards.

World Wide Web, World Live Web, World Life Web

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In 1994, in the wake of Tim Berners Lee‘s work, the World Wide Web was officially born. A global web, wide in its dimensions as in its contents. Over the years, these contents have literally exploded, imposing the use of search engines to try and sort out this fertile chaos on the basis of the principle of a classification ‘by relevance’. The domain name (DNS) to identify and classify web sites and to adress documents and the  “http protocol” (hypertext transfer protocol) to retrieve them are the main features of this first documentary age of the web.

Then came the World Live Web, an instantaneous subset of the World Wide Web, a web giving the latest published information in real time. Google News service was one of the pioneers of this second documentary age, but it also enables to refer to what is called micro contents (citizen media), e.g. comments on blogs. Specialised search engines like Technorati are integrated with tools that power the blogosphere and are able to index new content within ten minutes. According to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs every day. In april 2008, Technorati is tracking more than 100 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. For instance searching for artgallery.lu in Technorati gives more than 100 results.

We are now entering a third documentary age, the World Life Web, in particular with the extraordinary boom of social networks (Facebook, MySpace) and of virtual worlds  (Second Life). The main issues of this new age are the sociability and the indexable and remixable nature of our digital identity as well as its traces on the network.

Olivier Ertzscheid, enseignant-chercheur (Maître de Conférences) en Sciences de l’information et de la communication au département Infocom de l’IUT de la Roche sur Yon (Université de Nantes) a publié un petit texte à vocation pédagogique sur ce sujet sur son blog personnel affordance.info.