Register for Google I/O 2011

Update 11:30am PST: Google I/O 2011 has sold out.

(Cross-posted from The Official Google Blog.)

We’ve been counting down the days until Google I/O 2011 and hope that you have been, too. With 91 days, 22 hours and 45 minutes to go, we’re excited to announce that registration is now open at www.google.com/io. Our largest annual developer conference will take place on May 10-11, 2011 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif.

The focus of I/O 2011 will be all about the cloud, and feature the latest Google products and technologies including Android, Google Chrome, App Engine, Google Web Toolkit and Google APIs. There will be many opportunities to meet members of Google’s engineering teams and take deep dives into the technologies with more than 100 technical sessions, roundtables and more. The Developer Sandbox, which we introduced at I/O 2009, will be back, featuring developers from more than 100 companies to demo their apps, share their experiences and exchange ideas.

If you liked our HTML5 countdown, stay tuned for more surprises. We’ll keep you posted on the latest developments for Google I/O 2011 at the website, on Twitter (@Googleio) and Google Buzz. Get your tickets early—last year we sold out in record time!

Registration opens with an Early Bird rate of $450, which applies through April 16 ($550 after April 16). Faculty and students can register at the discounted Academia rate of $150, which will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

Learn more and register today at www.google.com/io.

We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco!

By Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering

Google Chrome at Google I/O 2010

We kicked off Day 1 of Google I/O this year by highlighting the progress of the web platform.

The Day 1 keynote included a number of exciting announcements and demos from the Chrome Team. To demonstrate the power of building with HTML5, Sundar Pichai invited on stage a number of Chrome partners, including Clicker who demonstrated the power of video and highlighted one of the big open questions for the web: the need for a freely available, high quality video codec for the tag. With the support of Mozilla, Opera, and Adobe, we announced the launch of the WebM Project, which makes a high quality video codec freely available to everyone.

We also announced the upcoming Chrome Web Store, which will launch later this year to help make great web applications more discoverable. We showed how rich web apps and content like Sports Illustrated will be discovered, launched, and even purchased from the Web Store when it launches later this year.

In addition to our keynote announcements, the Chrome Team also led a number of sessions throughout both days of the conference, focusing on Chrome, HTML5, and the web as a platform.

Here’s a recap of what was covered in our sessions:

• Beyond JavaScript: programming the web with native code - Although JavaScript performance is rapidly increasing, there are still applications for which native code is a better choice. Learn about Native Client and how you can use it to build rich applications with all of the advantages and power of the web.

• Chrome Extensions - how-to - Google Chrome shipped an extensions API in version 4.0. Since last year, new capabilites have been added to the extensions framework, and many people have already written powerful extensions with minimal effort. Find out how to write an extension, and what's coming next in Chrome Extensions.

• HTML5 status update - Where is HTML5 today? What new features are now broadly supported, what features are on the horizon, and what features are on the chopping block? How do we decide what to implement, what to propose, and what to drop? Find out.

• Developing web apps for the Chrome Web Store - Google Chrome is a powerful platform for developing web apps. With Chrome web apps, we're making it easier for users to discover and use these apps. Learn how to build and sell apps for the Chrome Web Store.

• WebM Open Video Playback in HTML5 - The new open VP8 codec and WebM file format present exciting opportunities for innovation in HTML5 . In this session, you'll see WebM playback in action while YouTube and Brightcove engineers show you how to support the format in your own HTML5 site.

• Google Chrome's Developer Tools - In this session we'll give an overview of Developer Tools for Google Chrome that is a part of the standard Chrome distribution. Chrome Developer Tools allow inspecting, debugging and tuning the web applications and many more. In addition to this overview we would like to share some implementation details of the Developer Tools features and call for your contribution.

• Developing With HTML5 - This session covers the HTML5 APIs available to Google Chrome and Google Chrome OS applications and Google Chrome extensions. Learn how to design web applications for a Google Chrome OS netbook using the latest web technologies.

• Using Google Chrome Frame - Google Chrome Frame brings the HTML5 platform and fast Javascript performance to IE6, 7 & 8. This session will cover the latest on Google Chrome Frame, what it can do for you and your customers, how it can be used, and a sneak peak into what's planned next.

In case you couldn’t attend in-person, all the links above include videos and slides from each session. You can also find all the Chrome session videos on this YouTube playlist. Thanks to everyone who showed up this year and made Google I/O such a great event.

By Ian Fette, Google Chrome Team

The Social Web at Google I/O 2010

Google I/O attendees and speakers this year had the opportunity to participate in some fascinating and important conversations around the social web. The Developer Sandbox featured 16 companies on hand to talk about their social efforts, including Atlassian, eBay, IBM, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Plaxo, Playfish, Yahoo!, and Voxeo.

In addition, nine sessions on social topics took place during the 2-day conference -- dealing with everything from real-time streams to OpenSocial in the enterprise. Of particular emphasis were open standards such as ActivityStreams, PubSubHubbub, OAuth, Salmon, and Webfinger that are fast becoming the foundational technologies for a more open and social web. The Google Buzz API was announced and covered in detail. And, of course, a deep look was taken at the future of the social web.

This is a big year for the social web, and we hope that the videos and slides from each session will expand your knowledge of and engagement with these exciting ideas and technologies:

• Fireside chat with the Social Web team - Rockstars of the Social Web team at Google gather to talk with attendees about a truly open and social web.


• What's the hubbub about Google Buzz APIs? - Chris Chabot introduces the Google Buzz API and provides a deep dive on the open standards it uses such as ActivityStreams, PubSubHubbub, OAuth, Salmon, and WebFinger, and demonstrates how to build your own apps on top of the API.


• Surf the stream: Google Buzz, location, and social gaming - Bob Aman and Timothy Jordan continue the Google Buzz API party with Buzz Bingo, a social game built on App Engine and Google Buzz.


• iGoogle developer portal and tools - The iGoogle Gadget Dashboard and the OpenSocial Development Environment are introduced by Shih-chia Cheng and Albert Cheng to help you build and maintain better OpenSocial gadgets for iGoogle.


• Make your application real-time with PubSubHubbub - Atom and RSS feeds are even more valuable when they’re pushed to subscribers in real-time. In this session, Brett Slatkin (Google) and Julien Genestoux (Superfeedr) show you how to implement PubSubHubbub for better stream publishing and consumption.


• The open & social web - Chris Messina uses a cartoon narrative to tell the epic story of Jack and Kate, explaining how immigration, staying in touch, and sharing rich media relate to emerging technologies like OpenID, WebFinger, and publishing technologies like PubSubHubbub, ActivityStreams, and Salmon.


• Bridging the islands: Building fluid social experiences across websites - Once you’ve seen Chris Messina’s talk on the open & social web, you’re bound to ask how you connect your site to the rest of the Social Web to increase traffic, engagement, and relevance. John Panzer and Joseph Smarr give you the answer: by adopting the awesome open technologies described in this talk!


• Where is the social web going next? - Kara Swisher moderates a panel of leading experts from LinkedIn, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and MySpace debating issues like privacy and providing their best guesses at the direction of the foundational technologies of the social web.


• Best practices for implementing OpenSocial in the Enterprise - Experts in the deployment of OpenSocial in the enterprise gather to talk implementation and best practices as well as review existing challenges.

You can also find all the Social Web I/O 2010 session videos on this YouTube playlist.

We had a great time at Google I/O this year and look forward to a long and fruitful discussion of everything social as we continue to work hard at making the the web more social, and the social web more open. Stay tuned to our progress on the Google Social Web Blog

By Timothy Jordan, Developer Relations

Ignite Google I/O: Digital Art, Data, Wave & Cheezburgers

I'm returning to host Ignite at Moscone West for the third Google I/O on Wednesday at 4pm PST (here's the wave). The short talks will be a mixture of tech culture, tech achievements and tech challenges. Our nine speakers will be the perfect cap to the Day 1 of the conference. Each speaker will have just 5 minutes to tell their tale via 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds.

In no particular order, our speakers are:

• Krissy Clark - Narrative Landscapes (Or a Vision I Had in the Desert)
• Ben Huh (I Can has Cheez Burger) - Evolution of the Meme
• Matt Harding (Where The Hell Is Matt?) - The Imaginary Line of Ancient Cosmic Weirdness
• Clay Johnson (Sunlight Foundation) - Tales from the District: How Washington Publishes Data
• Bradley Vickers - How to Row across the North Atlantic, Ration Food and Not Have Your Teammates Eat You
• Aaron Koblin (Google/Sheep Market) - Digital Art
• Michael Van Riper - Confessions of a Serial Community Organizer
• Anne Veling - Feeling Lonely on Google Wave
• James Young - You Sank My Battleship!

In case you want to brush up on Ignite before Google I/O, you can peruse the Ignite Show video site. Ignite is in over a hundred cities world-wide, and we collect as many of the talks as we can at www.igniteshow.com.

By Brady Forrest, O'Reilly/Ignite

Google APIs + HTML5 = A New Era of Mobile Apps

This post is part of the Who's @ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that give a closer look at developers who'll be speaking or demoing at Google I/O. This guest post is written by Adrian Graham, co-founder of nextstop.com who will give us a demo inside the Developer Sandbox.

When building nextstop's HTML5 mobile app, we were able to leverage a powerful combination of HTML5 and Google API's to build a mobile web experience that we believe rivals what we could have built natively. For more on our mobile app, check out this post -- here we will just focus on the technologies that made this experience possible.

Lately HTML5's video features have gotten a lot of attention, but it's three other HTML5 features that we've found most useful for mobile web development.

1. Prefetching using LocalStorage: It's no secret that mobile data networks are slow but by putting a bit of thought into what users will tap on next, and prefetching that data in the background you can build a dramatically faster user experience. It's possible to do limited forms of prefetching using plain old JavaScript, but using the localStorage key/value storage built into HTML5, we're able to store much more data and therefore prefetch more aggressively.

If you're using a recent version of Chrome or Safari or on an iPhone 3 or Android 2 phone and want a sense of what prefetching feels like, try clicking the left and right arrows here (you can ignore the warning you will see in Chrome and Safari).

2. Geolocation: Using the geolocation features built into HTML5 (and available on iPhone 3 and Android 2), we're able to connect you with local information based on the GPS in your phone, so all you have to do is launch the app to see nearby recommendations. I wish it were a bit faster, but it sure beats entering an address or zip code -- and it's super easy to hook into as a developer.

3. App Caching: The last HTML5 feature that we heavily rely on is the application cache. If a cache manifest file is specified, the browser won't re-download files unless the content of the manifest file has been updated. This may not sound like a big deal, but the latency of cellular networks can be long enough that requesting multiple files at startup can slow down your app by 10 or 20 seconds. Ideally, you'd put all your static JavaScript, CSS, and image files in the manifest file, so users never have to wait for them to be downloaded more than once.

As excited as we are about HTML5, things get even more interesting when you combine these technologies with Google APIs.

1. Google Maps API V3: Google Maps V3 has been rewritten from the ground up to better support modern mobile web browsers, and it shows. We were able to build a map interface into our mobile app that is nearly as full featured as our main site, including support for dynamic updates when the user pans and gestures like pinch to zoom on the iPhone. Coupled with the Geolocation support in HTML5, we can easily show users where they are in relation to the recommendations on the map. A year ago, this would have required writing a fair amount of native code. Today it can be done in the browser and works on both Android 2 and iPhone 3 devices.

2. Google Analytics: Since we prefetch most of our content, we end up rendering mobile pages using JavaScript. This makes tracking things like page views a little more tricky than a typical website, since we're not requesting an HTML file for each page view (and the App Cache can further complicate matters). We planned on building a custom mobile analytics system, but we decided to try running Google Analytics in the mobile web browser instead. Using the _trackPageview method (with a URL corresponding to each mobile "page" generated by Javascript) has worked surprisingly well and has had minimal performance impact. Best of all, if you're already using Google Analytics on your main site, you see all your mobile analytics in the same place. This lets you do things like easily compare the time on site for a mobile visitor and a desktop visitor. (Here's one data point if you're wondering whether or not to build a mobile web version of your site: visitors spend over twice as long using our mobile HTML5 app as they do on our website.)

3. Google Local Search API: Coupled with HTML5 geolocation, the Google Local Search API becomes even easier to use. For instance, the nextstop app lets users add places that they like to nextstop's database. In a desktop browser, we have no choice but to ask the user to type in some words and do a local search. However, on the phone, we can show users a list of nearby places by passing the local search api the user's current position. More often than not, no typing is required to locate the place you'd like to add.

If you can't already tell, we're pretty excited about the future mobile apps running inside a browser. As mobile web browsers and web APIs continue to evolve, we expect more and more people to hop on the HTML5 bandwagon as a cross-platform way to build powerful mobile apps.

We'll be at Google I/O in May and would love for you to stop by our demo station in the Developer Sandbox and share any questions, tips, or tricks you have related to HTML5 mobile development. And in the meantime, if you have a great idea for an HTML5 app based on nextstop's data, we encourage you to check out our API.

By Adrian Graham, co-founder of nextstop.com

Now available: Schedule for Google I/O sessions & office hours

If you’re attending Google I/O next month, you’ve likely taken a gander at this year’s sessions and made a mental note of ones you’d like to attend. (Or if you’re like Julio Menendez, you’ve already made a list)

We’ve just posted our session schedule so you can now start planning out your two days at I/O. We’ve also got a few more things in the works to help you plan your agenda, including:

• Session agenda builder to create a customized agenda you can port to your personal calendar. (Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook)

• Google I/O Android app you can download to your Android device so you can easily reference the I/O schedule, star sessions, look at a map of the venue, and find other event info while you’re walking around Moscone West.

• Google Wave will be in full force at I/O as a channel for discussion and live notes during I/O. Stay tuned for more information on how to use Wave at the event.

We’ll let you know as these agenda planning features go live. Be sure to check @googleio for the latest updates.

In addition, we’ve also posted our Office Hours schedule. Google engineers will be on hand to answer any questions you may have about the products and technologies featured at I/O. We’ll be holding office hours for Android, App Engine, Chrome, Closure Compiler / Closure Library, Enterprise, Developer Docs, Geo, Go, Google APIs, Google Project Hosting, GWT, Social Web, and Wave.

24 days left until I/O - let the countdown begin!

Posted by Christine Tsai, Google Developer Team

Who's @ Google I/O: 106 companies, and more on the way

Google I/O is now just a month away, and we're incredibly excited by the breadth of companies and developers that will be showcasing their applications in this year's Developer Sandbox. As of today, over 100 companies are listed on the I/O website, and we anticipate over 180 companies to be confirmed by the time of I/O.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be inviting developers from these companies to do guest posts on this blog -- giving you insight into their development work and their approach to using Google technologies like Chrome, the Android SDK, GWT and Google APIs.

And for those of you who'll be at Google I/O next month, you'll have the opportunity to meet these developers in person at the Developer Sandbox, which runs for the duration of the conference (see event schedule).

Many thanks to the companies that will be joining us in this year's Sandbox, and to those of you who helped sell out this year's conference 10 weeks in advance!

By Joyce Sohn, Google Developer Team

Ignite at Google I/O 2010!

Ignite will be at this year’s Google I/O! Last year, we had talks on big data, cartography and DIY devices -- a "typical" Ignite line-up. This year, our line-up includes folks like Cheezburger CEO, Ben Huh, and digital artist, Aaron Koblin. However, we also want you! We want to hear your cool ideas, hacks, how-to's, and war stories.

Each Ignite talk is 5 minutes long -- with 20 slides and only 15 seconds a slide (they auto-advance) -- and I'll be hosting the talk at I/O. If you’re not sure what to talk about, watch Scott Berkun's excellent How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk.

Submit your talk by March 31st, and we’ll announce the selected speakers on April 3rd. Those who are chosen to give an Ignite talk will receive a free ticket to Google I/O.

If you need further inspiration, you can watch any of the hundreds of Ignite videos at Ignite Show.

By Brady Forrest, O'Reilly/Ignite

@brady

Fireside chats at Google I/O

At Google I/O (just 2 months away!), we're excited to bring back a series of sessions called fireside chats. Fireside chats are smaller, intimate sessions where Google teams will talk about major developments with their product, what's in store for developers, and spend most of the time answering burning questions from the audience.

I/O will feature the following fireside chats:

• Fireside chat with the Android team
  Speakers: The Android team with Chris DiBona moderating
  Pull up a chair and join the Android team at Google for a fireside chat. It's your opportunity to ask us about the platform and to tell us where you'd like to see it go in the future.
  
  
• Fireside chat with Android handset manufacturers
  Come join us for a fireside chat with the top Android handset manufacturers. Hear about the types of devices being planned for 2010 and get your device-specific questions answered.
  
  
• Fireside chat with the App Engine team
  Speakers: Brett Slatkin, Guido van Rossum, Matt Blain, Max Ross, Don Schwarz, Alfred Fuller, Kevin Gibbs, Sean Lynch
  It's been an busy year for the App Engine team with lots of new features and lots of new developers. Come tell us about what you've loved and what still bugs you. With several members of the App Engine team on deck, you'll get the answers to your questions straight from the source.
  
  
• Fireside chat with the Google Chrome and Chrome OS teams
  Speakers: Ian Fette, Brian Rakowski, Linus Upson, Caesar Sengupta, Matt Papakipos
  Curious about what's new in Google Chrome, or what makes Google Chrome OS so exciting? We'll talk briefly about the major developments over the past year, and then field questions from the audience. If you're dying to know something, this is the place to find an answer.
  
  
• Fireside chat with the Enterprise team
  Speakers: Chris Vander Mey, Scott McMullan, Ryan Boyd, David Glazer, Ken Lin
  With the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace, we've introduced a new way to expose your software to businesses - and a new way to extend Google Apps. If you're interested in building apps, what we're thinking about, or if you have other questions about the Marketplace, pull up a chair.
  
  
• Fireside chat with the Geo team
  Speakers: Thor Mitchell, Peter Birch, Matt Holden, Ben Appleton, Bart Locanthi, Thatcher Ulrich
  Here's your opportunity to pick the brains of the people behind the Maps, Earth, and Maps Data APIs! We'll take a quick walk through the milestones of the last year, and then open it up to your questions. Don't miss your opportunity to get the straight scoop on all that's new in the world of Google Geo APIs.
  
  
• Fireside chat with the GWT team
  Speakers: Bruce Johnson, Joel Webber, Ray Ryan, Amit Manjhi, Jaime Yap, Kathrin Probst, Eric Ayers
  If you're interested in what the GWT team has been up to since 2.0, here's your chance. We'll have several of the core engineers available to discuss the new features and frameworks in GWT, as well as to answer any questions that you might have.
  
  
• Fireside chat with the Social Web team
  Speakers: David Glazer, DeWitt Clinton, John Panzer, Joseph Smarr, Sami Shalabi, Todd Jackson
  Social is quickly becoming an integral part of how we experience the web, and this is your chance to pick the brains of the people who are working on Buzz, the Buzz API and the underlying open protocols such as Activity Streams and OAuth which are an essential component of a truly open & social web.

You can check out the fireside chats and other sessions on code.google.com/io. The teams are looking forward to your questions!


Posted by Christine Tsai, Google I/O team

The Business of Code, The Code of Business

This post is part of the Who's @ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that gives a closer look at developers who'll be speaking or demoing at Google I/O. This post is written by Albert Wenger, partner at Union Square Ventures (and still enjoys writing code!). Albert will be speaking alongside others in venture capital on a panel at Google I/O.

Reading the Google Code blog, it is hard not to marvel at the fundamental transformation that is taking place in the business of code. By the business of code, I mean the economics of developing and selling software. My first exposure to the software business was as a teenager in Germany some twenty five years ago. Driver's education there is quite expensive because one has to take many mandatory lessons. After all, once you have passed you get to drive on the Autobahn, which, to this date, has long stretches without a speed limit! I thought I was being clever by agreeing to write software for a driving school in exchange for free lessons. It turns out the clever one was the owner of the driving school who turned around and sold the software to several other schools.

So what would it have taken for me then to become an ISV (independent software vendor), other than actually having the idea? These were the early days of PCs. I would have had to spend a lot of money on marketing and a lot of time on in-person sales and on-premise / telephone support. Most ISVs at the time grew locally for that reason and it was not uncommon to have highly fragmented markets with literally dozens of different vendors. As the software would have grown past the very simple initial functionality that I had created, I would have had to write pretty much everything I needed myself. Need billing? Write a billing module. Need asset tracking? Write an asset tracking module. The marketplace for components evolved only much later and was almost as fragmented as the ISV market.

This situation persisted until quite recently. In fact, in 2003 I spent a year getting to know the market for software for trucking companies in the US (Why? That's a long story). That market still had essentially the same characteristics: highly fragmented, regional customer bases, and almost 100% monolithic custom systems.

Since then, the situation has changed dramatically. Today, creating new software means focusing on what the unique contribution is that one wants to offer and figuring out how to integrate with everything else. Need a spreadsheet? Use Google Apps. Need telephony? Use Twilio (disclosure: Twilio is a USV portfolio company). Marketing can happen on the web through keyword advertising and, better yet, SEO and customer sharing. For many solutions, even sales can be entirely web-based (enter a credit card!). Support can happen over the web and often users can support each other through community. Add cloud computing to the mix and you eliminate the fixed cost that was such a high barrier to entry in the early days of the web (I remember the extraordinary bills for servers and bandwidth in 1999!).

All of this has made it possible for small teams to create big successes. It is amazing what a few great coders can do, leveraging all the services that are now available. It is,however, not just the cost side of the business of code that has changed dramatically. Competition has gone global. Someone in a faraway place can create a system, and it is instantly available everywhere. The days of the profitable, regional ISV business are over. The source of competitive advantage has also shifted. In the past, if your solution had better features, you could land a sale even against a competitor that had more customers. Now, better features don't mean that much if the larger competitor has built a network effect into their business. Imagine trying to start a LinkedIn or Salesforce competitor with better features. So the very same forces that are making it much easier to get started are making it much harder to build a successful and sustainable business.

Does that mean that there will be fewer opportunities going forward? Maybe. But there is a strong countervailing force that is creating important new opportunities: the code of business is also changing. By the code of business, I mean how companies and industries (and even societies) are organized. At Union Square Ventures, we are convinced that over time, the Internet will transform most, if not all, industries as much as it is changing the software business. This has started with the media industry, where after years of prediction of change we are now seeing massive shifts.

The reason that the code of business will change is that much of it is based on historic constraints on the bandwidth and latency of information flows. For instance, a command-and-control type hierarchy is still at the heart of (almost) all large corporations. Information flows up the hierarchy with middle management in charge of aggregating information flows. Commands then flow down with middle management translating into finer grained actions. This basic structure dates back to a time of messengers and telegraphs. Corporations are slowly shifting away towards more of an Internet architecture of "small pieces, loosely joined" -- but in many cases the end state may mean that the "pieces" are independent, small companies instead of units of a large company.

These changes will take a great deal of time (decades) because existing structures have a ton of inertia. Far more people tend to be interested in preserving the status quo than in making radical changes. Also, when a whole system needs changing, it is often difficult to get there one piece-at-a-time because all the components need to fit together. But as they start to occur in other industries, the opportunities will be massive. To give just one example, consider education: the size of the textbook industry alone in the US is estimated at $7 billion annually. This is a pure content business ripe for disruption.

Enough reading -- time for everyone with a transformative idea to start coding!

By Albert Wenger, Union Square Ventures and Continuations.

Who's @ Google I/O: spotlight on Social Web (including Buzz!)

Following on the heels of today's announcement on Buzz, we're excited to bring you the latest on all things social at Google I/O, starting with a session on Buzz APIs and a new panel session!

What's the hubbub about Google Buzz APIs?
Google Buzz is a new way to share updates, photos, videos and more, and start conversations about the things you find interesting. In this session, we'll take a deep dive into building with the Buzz APIs and the open standards it uses, such as ActivityStrea.ms, PubSubHubbub, OAuth, Salmon and WebFinger.

Where is the social web going next?
With the advent of social protocols like OAuth, OpenID and ActivityStrea.ms, it's clear that the web has gone social and is becoming more open. Adam Nash (LinkedIn), Daniel Raffel (Yahoo), John Panzer (Google), Lili Cheng (Microsoft), Monica Keller (MySpace), and Ryan Sarver (Twitter) will discuss the importance of such emerging technologies, how they've adopted them in their products and debate what's next.

Here are additional sessions that'll give you a deep dive into the emerging technologies and standards that will help you create a more engaging user experience for your web applications and sites, and enable a people-centric web.

• Optimize your site with Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, Twitter, & more


• iGoogle developer portal and tools


• Make your application real-time with PubSubHubbub


• The open & social web

You'll also have the opportunity to meet developers from the following companies in the Social Web pod of the Developer Sandbox: Atlassian, eBay, IBM, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Playfish, Yahoo!, and Voxeo. They'll be demoing their social apps, talking in-depth about integrating with various Google technologies, answering questions, and chatting with attendees.

To learn more about and register for Google I/O, visit code.google.com/io. We add new sessions and content to the I/O website each week, so follow @googleio on Twitter to keep up with changes!

By Joyce Sohn, Google Developer Team

Who's @ Google I/O: spotlight on Enterprise sessions

Each week in our "Who's @ Google I/O" blog series, we'll highlight the latest from a featured track at I/O. This week, the spotlight is on Enterprise -- a major theme of this year's event.

In 2009, we saw an increasing number of large companies moving to the cloud (and "Going Google"), choosing the web as their platform of choice. At I/O, we'll share our enterprise and commercial developer offerings and focus on how to build business apps in the cloud.

We'll be adding new Enterprise sessions over the next couple of months, but here's a preview of some of the sessions you'll see at I/O:

Customizing Google Apps & integrating with customer environments
Hear real-life examples of customizing Google Apps to meet customer requirements from several panelists, including two of our Sandbox participants -- Iein Valdez of Appirio and Michael Cohn of CloudSherpas. Explore integration issues and deployment best practices with the people who have done it.

Run corporate applications on Google App Engine? Yes we do.
Our CIO, Ben Fried, describes how Google IT and other companies use the latest Google App Engine enhancements to respond more quickly to business needs while reducing operational burden to near zero.

It’s 2010: How is your move to the cloud doing?
Come discover the latest innovations from Google enabling IT and ISV developers to build on Google's cloud-based storage and computing offerings. This talk will give a complete overview of Google's commercial developer products and provide insights and best practices so enterprise developers can take more advantage of the cloud.

Launch your app inside of Google Apps with gadgets
Gadgets represent a valuable opportunity to get in front of the many Google Apps users who use Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Sites throughout the day. This session will talk about how you can write gadgets as natural extensions of your existing products and take advantage of the unique opportunities available to gadgets in Google Apps.

Making Freemium work - converting free users to paying customers
Don Dodge will moderate a panel of prominent venture capital leaders (Brad Feld, Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, Matt Holleran) to help you understand how to build free apps that can be upgraded to paid & how to build products that can be profitable.

You can find the current list of Enterprise sessions here.

To learn more about and register for Google I/O, visit code.google.com/io. We add new sessions and content to the I/O website each week so follow @googleio on Twitter to keep up with changes!

By Joyce Sohn, Google Developer Team

Google I/O 2010: Now open for registration

I'm excited to announce that registration for Google I/O is now open at code.google.com/io. Our third annual developer conference will return to Moscone West in San Francisco on May 19-20, 2010. We expect thousands of web, mobile, and enterprise developers to be in attendance.

I/O 2010 will be focused on building the next generation of applications in the cloud and will feature the latest on Google products and technologies like Android, Google Chrome, App Engine, Google Web Toolkit, Google APIs, and more. Members of our engineering teams and other web development experts will lead more than 80 technical sessions. We'll also bring back the Developer Sandbox, which we introduced at I/O 2009, where developers from more than 100 companies will be on hand to demo their apps, answer questions and exchange ideas.

We'll be regularly adding more sessions, speakers and companies on the event website, and today we're happy to give you a preview of what's to come. Over half of all sessions are already listed, covering a range of products and technologies, as well as speaker bios. We've also included a short list of companies that will be participating in the Developer Sandbox. For the latest I/O updates, follow us (@googleio) on Twitter.

Today's registration opens with an early bird rate of $400, which applies through April 16 ($500 after April 16). Faculty and students can register at the discounted Academia rate of $100 (this discounted rate is limited and available on a first come, first serve basis).

Last year's I/O sold out before the start of the conference, so we encourage you to sign up in advance.

Google I/O
May 19-20, 2010
Moscone West, San Francisco

To learn more and sign up, visit code.google.com/io.

We hope to see you in May!

(Cross-posted with the Official Google Blog)

By David Glazer, Engineering Director

Google I/O Scavenger Hunt Winners

The astute conference attendee would have noticed hidden QR codes around the conference, as well as the scannable QR codes on everyone's badge. We wanted to find a fun way for people to bond with their new phones, as well as network with other attendees, so we set about creating a scavenger hunt game using Google App Engine & Friend Connect. The app handled game logistics (a leaderboard, URL endpoints), and we printed up a bunch of custom QR code stickers that pointed to game URLs.

App Engine made writing the scavenger hunt app much easier than it otherwise would have been. The initial version of the app took one developer less than a day to turn out, and we continued to add functionality and tweak it as I/O approached and we tested it in real-world situations. The versioning deployment made it very easy to test and push out new versions without disrupting existing users.

The overall structure of the app was very straightforward: every QR-code had a unique URL, which was embedded into the generated QR code. A URL was associated with a number of points to be awarded and a destination URL (such as the user's profile information, in the case of a user's badge QR code). Users were signed in using Friend Connect, which allowed us to avoid concerns of authenticating users and managing sessions.

When a user visited a URL for the first time, we recorded that fact so they couldn't try and get extra points with repeat visits, then sent them to the destination URL. We also kept a running count of the user's score against the User entity, so as to not have to count up their points on every request. Generating the leaderboard was a simple matter of querying for the users with the most points and displaying them.

QR codes were generated using the Chart API, which simply takes a string of text and a few other parameters, and returns a fully formed QR code.

The three resourceful and persistent folks below beat out the competition to rise to the top of the scavenger hunt ranks - going to great lengths, including swag bribery, to gain points. A hearty (if belated) congratulations to the winners of the Google I/O mobile scavenger hunt!



1st Place - Abraham Williams
2nd Place - Waylon Flinn
3rd Place - Pete Richards


We hope everyone that participated learned how to use their Android phones a little better, met people they otherwise wouldn't have, and had some fun :)

By Stephanie Liu, Google Developer Programs

Google I/O Interactive Map: Now with videos + some Open Source goodness!

If you attended Google I/O 2009 a few weeks ago, you may have noticed a kiosk station on the 2nd and 3rd floors of Moscone West labelled 'Interactive Conference Map, powered by Google Maps'. The kiosk simply pointed to a JavaScript Maps API-based interactive map of the venue I created in my 20% time.

Now that all the I/O session videos and presentations are live, we took the opportunity to mash up the videos with our interactive conference map to provide developers with an alternate way to navigate through 80+ keynote and session videos, and bring the action at I/O to life virtually. For example, here are videos of sessions that took place in Room 1 (click the tabs for Wednesday and Thursday sessions). And here's where the keynote sessions took place. Check out where we filmed interviews with I/O sandbox developers on their apps, technical challenges and business best practices.


Now, hopefully you enjoyed using the map and are now thinking, "Cool, I want to do something like this for my next event!" (or your college campus, or such). If you are, then good news everyone, I've open sourced the interactive conference map and all relevant resources. Inside the project, you'll also find a how to article outlining the steps I went through to create the map.

If you attended I/O, then I hope you enjoyed it and had time to stop by the conference map kiosk! If not, no worries, just make sure to check out the open source project and see if you can use the code and/or techniques in your next mapping project!

By Roman Nurik, Developer Programs Engineer

Google I/O: Session videos on building apps using the AJAX and Data APIs

One of the best things about attending Google I/O is the chance to meet developers who are using our APIs and interacting with Google technology in ways we could never imagine. Not only was it amazing to see exciting examples of apps built on the AJAX and Data APIs being demoed at the developer sandbox, but it was also interesting to meet other developers who are just starting to use many of our APIs for their specific needs and cool ideas. Hopefully, by making all of our sessions available for free to watch on your own time, many of you who are interested in Google's APIs will get a better understanding of the ways we are making our API offerings easier to use, more efficient and much more feature rich.

Big Announcements & More

One of the most exciting announcements at this year's I/O was the developer preview of Google Wave. After its introduction during the Day 2 keynote, there were three sessions devoted to the Google Wave APIs: Programming With and For Google Wave, Google Wave: Powered by GWT, and Google Wave: Under the hood. We hope you're as excited as we are, and can't wait to see how you use these tools.

Another new product announcement this year was Google Web Elements, which allow you to easily add your favorite Google products onto your own website. There are elements for Google News, Maps, Spreadsheets, YouTube and others, with more to come. Be sure to check out the Day 1 keynote for a complete introduction to the simple copy and paste power of Google Web Elements.

Keeping webmasters in mind, two sessions were all about optimizing your site for search. In one talk, Matt Cutts reviewed real sites that *you* submitted. talking through real-life issues that effect developers when it comes to optimizing their app for search. The other session focused on how to maximize your site, your content, and your application's exposure to search engines.

Javascript & Google AJAX APIs

The session on Custom Search Engines focused on helping your users search the sites and topics that are relevant to you. Nick Weininger discussed some of the ways to embed search and ads onto your site (including the new Custom Search element), then customize the look and feel of the results. Adobe was on hand to show how they're using Custom Search Engines to enhance their products and insert contextual search into the developer's programming workflow. We also announced the launch of the Custom Search gadget for Blogger which gives your blog's visitors the ability to search not just your posts, but web pages linked from your blog, your blog lists, and link lists.

In the session Implementing your Own Visualization Datasource, attendees learned about building a server-side data source compatible with the Google Visualization API, including hearing about the experience from a Salesforce.com expert. Itai Raz also gave a great session on using the Visualization API with GWT and treated the audience to advanced Javascript tricks such as wrapping visualizations as gadgets.

Ben Lisbakken's session detailed some advanced Javascript techniques and then delved into some of great tips and tracks he learned while creating the Code Playground, a tool which can help developers learn about and experiment with many of Google's APIs. Some of the highlights include increasing the security and performance of applications and learning why App Engine is so easy on which to develop.

Jon Kragh of VastRank showed off some neat ways he's Using AJAX APIs to Navigate User-Generated Content, including using Google Maps to display nearby colleges and translating reviews into the viewer's language. Also, Michael Thompson explored the idea of Building a Business with Google's free APIs using example Google Gadgets, Google Gadget Ads, Mapplets, and the Maps API.

Google Data APIs

Jeff Fisher and Jochen Hartmann spoke on the future direction of the YouTube API as it becomes increasingly social. They used two sample applications to demonstrate the use of the activity feeds as well as the new "SUP" feed that allows high traffic websites to monitor YouTube for activity in a scalable manner.

The session about writing monetizable YouTube apps focused on creating applications that allowed access to YouTube videos in creative ways. In the talk, Kuan Yong showed how to expertly navigate through the YouTube API terms of service in order to avoid business pitfalls so that developers can monetize their own apps.

Eric Bidelman and Anil Sabharwal discussed the Document List Data API in detail, highlighting common enterprise use cases such as sync, migration, sharing, and legal discovery. Partners Syncplicity, OffiSync, and gDocsBar showed off compelling demos.

In the talk on the evolution of the Google Data protocol, Sven Mawson outlined all of the new features in the Google Data APIs that will help in the creation of more efficient applications. Two of the new additions included a compact and customizable JSON output and the option to retrieve only the parts of a feed that you want using partial GET.

Monsur Hossain and Eric Bidelman showed how to build a read/write gadget using OAuth and the Google Data JavaScript library. They went through a step by step set of instructions that explained how to set up the gadget code, how to get a token using the OAuth proxy, and how to read and write data to Blogger using the JavaScript library inside of an iGoogle gadget.

Google Geo APIs

Mano Marks and Pamela Fox started with a grab bag session covering the vast spectrum of Geo APIs, discussing touring and HTML 5 in KML, the Sketchup Ruby API (with an awesome physics demo), driving directions (did you know you can solve the Traveling Salesman Problem in Javascript?), desktop AIR applications, reverse geocoding, user location, and monetization using the Maps Ad Unit and GoogleBar. Pamela finished by sneak previewing an upcoming feature in the Flash API: 3d perspective view.

In the session on performance tips for Maps API mashups, Marcelo Camelo announced Google Maps API v3, a latency-oriented rewrite of our popular JS Maps API. Also see Susannah Raub's more in-depth talk about Maps API v3. Then Pamela gave advice on how to load many markers (by using a lightweight marker class, clustering, or rendering a clickable tile layer) and on how to load many polys (by using a lightweight poly class, simplifying, encoding, or rendering tiles). Sascha Aickin, an engineer at Redfin, showed how they were able to display 500 housing results on their real estate search site by creating the "SuperMarker" class.

Mano and Keith presented various ways of hosting geo data on Google infrastructure: Google Base API, Google App Engine, and the just-released Google Maps data API. Jeffrey Sambells showed how ConnectorLocal used the API (and their own custom PHP wrapper) for storing user data.

On the same day as announcing better integration between the Google Earth and Google Maps JS APIs, Roman Nurik presented on advanced Earth API topics, and released a utility library for making that advanced stuff simple.

By Adam Feldman and Brandon Bilinski, Google Developer Team

Everybody's talking: the Social track at Google I/O

I had a great time at Google I/O -- meeting lots of developers from around the world who are interested in developing applications that use social data. In addition to building web applications for traditional social networks like orkut, MySpace and hi5, developers are also looking at enterprise and mobile applications which take advantage of the social graph, gadgets for Google's platforms like iGoogle, Google Calendar and Gmail, and gadgets for the 5 million websites and blogs powered by Google Friend Connect. We had some important questions raised in many of the sessions and also in the fireside chats with containers and app developers. It was exciting to see the whole OpenSocial ecosystem come together to discuss the current status and progress of social technologies, as exemplified by the I/O Developer Sandbox.

All the sessions at Google I/O were recorded, and videos and presentation materials are now available on the Google I/O website. Here's a little more info about the sessions in the social track:

Google and the Social Web
Daniel Holevoet outlined all the ways Google uses social technologies, highlighting those services which allow developers to extend them using the OpenSocial APIs. During his talk, Dan announced the new support for OpenSocial gadgets in Google Calendar, which include hooks into a calendar-specific API for accessing the currently-selected date range. Dan demonstrated the Quartermile OpenSocial application he wrote along with Arne Rooman-Kurrik and showed how the app could be used for different purposes across iGoogle, Gmail and Google Calendar and talked about how it could be used on any website via Google Friend Connect or on traditional social networks supporting the OpenSocial APIs. Of course, Dan didn't get to cover all the exciting news about Google's social initiatives during this talk-- a real-time gadgets API was announced during the Developer Sandbox!

Google Friend Connect Gadgets: Best Practices in Code and Interaction Design
Jonathan Terleski (lead designer on Google Friend Connect) and I presented this session on best practices for building Google Friend Connect (GFC) gadgets for the millions of websites and blogs using GFC today. We gave a brief overview of OpenSocial, followed by some design principles and a basic framework to think about when building GFC gadgets: what are the social objects, how do users contribute them, and how to users consume them? In the last part of the talk, I discussed how to use page context in your gadgets for content, skinning and language while showing some small bits of code to accomplish each. Most importantly, we announced the opening of submissions to the Google Friend Connect gadget directory and support for OpenSocial 0.9 in GFC gadgets.

Beyond Cut and Paste - Deep integrations with Google Friend Connect
In this talk, Arne Roomann-Kurrik and Chris Schalk talked about how they built the Plane Crazy site for flying enthusiasts and the Chow Down site for restaurant connoisseurs as example sites demonstrating how to integrate Google Friend Connect with existing login systems and add social functionality using the REST and RPC APIs. While these sites were built on top of Google App Engine (using Java and PHP), they talked about the other client libraries and raw protocols available for similar integrations. The Chow Down site is already open-sourced, and the Plane Crazy site will be shortly.

Google Friend Connect and the Real World
Patrick Chanezon led this session along with Shivani York, Henry Chan and Srivaths Lakshmi of TIME.com and Paul Berry of HuffingtonPost talking about how they integrated Google Friend Connect into their sites. Both TIME.com and HuffingtonPost used Google Friend Connect to create social lists where you rank the top items from the news, such as "Top 10 Movie Catchphrases" and "The World's Most Famous Swimsuits." Khris Loux, of JS-Kit, concluded the session by addressing why it's a good idea to integrate with Google Friend Connect and how the web is enhanced by having open API access to social data.

Building a Business with Social Apps
Shawn Shen and Chewy Trewhalla, Developer Advocates at Google, and Gerardo Capiel, VP of Product Management for the MySpace Open Platform, led this session showing how developers can make a living by building social apps. Virtual currencies, the recent OpenSocial extension proposal for a virtual currency spec and implementations on hi5, 51.com and other networks were discussed. In talking with a wide variety of developers and preparing this session content, our team learned even more about this industry, and we hope you can too.

Designing OpenSocial Apps for Speed and Scale
How do you use standard web optimization techniques in combination with existing and new features of OpenSocial 0.9 to develop a fast social application which scales efficiently? Arne Rooman-Kurrik and Chris Chabot examined this question in great depth. They took the Quartermile application which they developed and dived into the bandwidth, cpu and monetary savings achieved by applying a variety of optimizations--from image spriting, to data pipelining and proxied content. From the naive implementation to the optimized implementation, they showed how you could improve latency by nearly 70% and drastically reduce the cost of hosting a social application.

The Social Web: An Implementer's Guide
Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo, led this standing-room-only session about the current state of the social web and how "The Web is now social... and the Social Web is now open." He recapped progress made in the last year, with the emergence and increasing adoption of a variety of technologies which make up the Open Stack: Open ID, XRDS-Simple, OAuth, Portable Contacts, OpenSocial. He gave many demos, including demonstrating the death of the "password anti-pattern" leading to a 92% conversion rate on users importing their contacts from sites supporting OpenID+OAuth and Portable Contacts.

Powering Mobile Apps with Social Data
Many people today have a mobile device which has internet access, and they probably use those devices as much (if not more!) than they use their computers. I explored the different ways to use social data from the web to enhance the experience users have with their mobile devices. I demonstrated and dove into the code of three different types of apps -- pure web apps targeted at mobile devices, a web app which uses some native GPS functionality via Google Gears and adding a social scoreboard to the "Divide and Conquer" open source native Android application. I then spoke a bit about the future of mobile development and how the features available between native applications and web applications are beginning to merge with the new HTML5 and W3C standards which provide access to native functionality such as databases, app caches and GPS location data.

OpenSocial in the Enterprise
Social networks are typically thought of as tools for personal communication, but they've increasingly become important in the enterprise world as well. Chris Schalk of Google led this panel along with representatives from IBM, Salesforce.com, Oracle, eXo, SAP and Atlassian to share the ways enterprises have used OpenSocial technology outside of and behind the firewall.

There's a wealth of new information in these presentations which were all prepared especially for Google I/O, including several new announcements. The presenters also developed quite a bit of code for Google I/O, which we'll be releasing as Apache-licensed open source projects over the next couple weeks. Stay tuned to the OpenSocial blog for those releases.

By Ryan Boyd, OpenSocial Team