How To Write a Google Gadget

I’ve written some notes on the Google Gadget API and how to write a gadget, targeted at developers who already know Ajax.

What’s a Gadget?

• The gadget is an XML file sitting on your server. In my case, http://ajaxify.com/run/widgets/google/diggroundup.xml. It will get cached, so effectively it must be a static file.
• The user adds your gadget to their igoogle portal, or codes it into their own website, by specifying this URL (it may be done indirectly - via the gadget registry. You’ll appear in the registry if you’ve submitted your gadget to igoogle.)
• The gadget is rendered as an iframe, so you have all the usual security constraints which stop you borking the portal and other gadgets. This also means you can’t communicate with other Gadgets other than via than remote calls to a common third-party server (or has anyone tried hooking them together using the iframe-fragment identifier hack? ).

It’s based on a Digg Roundup tool, where the gadget show Digg stories according to user preferences such as topic and whether to go for popular or upcoming stories.

Kevin v. Evan

So I’ve had a week now to play around with Pownce, Kevin Rose’s (the founder of Digg, pictured left) newly launched Twitter killer.

Twitter, which launched a year ago, was obviously used as the initial inspiration for the Pownce. They both allow users to sign up, add friends, and broadcast quick notes to people. The main differences: Twitter is mobile-ready, allowing users to receive friend requests and new messages via text message. And Pownce gives users more flexibility in communicating by allowing messages just to friends. Pownce also allows different kinds of messages - file transfers, events, links and plain text messages (Twitter allows text and links only). There’s no reason, though, that users will use both. They’ll go with one or the other, or neither.

So is Pownce good enough to beat Twitter?

The early adopter crowd is going to be torn on this one. (Just about) everyone loves Kevin Rose, and anything he launches is going to get serious attention - on Digg, tech blogs and mainstream press. But a lot of people like Twitter, too, and that application has already reached the “network effect” stage of its business cycle. It continues to grow fast. And Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter (and Odeo and Blogger), is also well liked in Silicon Valley.

A breakdown of the basic features is in the chart to the right. Pownce also provides a few other bells and whistles not included in the chart. For example, it lets you forward a message to others (and also allows you to exclude those that have already received it). And they also give basic stats on messages, like how many people have received it. Pownce has an AIR desktop application, although there are similar apps for Twitter, too. Another thing to consider that’s not on the chart - Twitter has had, and continues to have, massive performance issues. It is slow or down way too often.

Services like Twitter and Pownce (and there are others, too - Jaiku, Kyte and many more) are highly viral and benefit from the network effect. People want to join the service that all of their friends already use, and so each new user adds value to the network as a whole. By that measure, Twitter is far ahead of Pownce.

Frankly, unless you really like the mobile aspect of Twitter, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the two services. I expect Twitter will add most of the Pownce features in the short term anyway. And many of the unique features of Pownce - like file sharing, group messaging, etc., are handled pretty well already by…email. Gmail, for example, lets users send files of up to 20 MB. Pownce lets you send up to 10 MB files, unless you pay for a pro account (then the limit is 100 MB). And email is certainly very useful for private and group messaging.

People use Twitter to quickly tell the world (or at least the people who care) what they are up to and what they are looking at on the web. Like blogging, it’s a one-to-many application that works very well. Twitter does that perfectly, and does little else. Pownce does it, too, but all the other features are really just distractions.

Pownce also does something that I find highly annoying. By default, you receive an email message every time you get a new friend or receive any sort of message. My inbox quickly filled up with dozens of emails telling me I had a message. But to read the message I have to click on a link and go to the service. The only reason for that is to generate page views

Nicely Done

Whatever company this is, they should use this as one of their primary recruiting tools. Well done. As soon as you get to about 0:53, you know it’s going to be good.

MyThings Tracks Your Things

MyThings is a service that allows users to create an online portfolio of valued belongings.

We reviewed iTaggit earlier this week; MyThings operates in the same space. Both provide personal asset management although MyThings is the more extensive offering of the two; MyThings took $8million from Carmel Ventures and Accel Partners in May 2006 and the funding shows.

MyThings offers a integrated one stop shop for collectibles. Items can be included in the database, with tags and pictures. Once listed users are able to obtain a valuation for the item, buy (or extend) the items warranty, purchase insurance, sell the item on eBay and even donate am item to a worthy cause. MyThings also includes an extensive database of items reported lost and stolen from the world of art, antiques and collectibles; MyThings users are able to add stolen items to the database at any time and likewise the service is able to screen new submissions for items that may have been stolen.

The company has offices in Menlo Park, London and Tel Aviv, delivering a global product with a lot of appeal. Perhaps my earlier assessment of the space (in the iTaggit review) as being niche was unwarranted; the extensive user collections listed on MyThings would indicate that listing collections online may actually be a hot vertical.

Phone Safari Notes and Quirks

Now we can get our hands on an iPhone, developers are testing out Safari to see what is actually available. How is the DOM? What events get fired? How does the keyboard send onkey* events? How is scrolling handled? How is the JavaScript support?

Abe Fettig has been jotting down his notes, which include:

• Poking around the DOM, I don’t see any special objects, with the possible exception of window.offscreenBuffering (set to true).
• Bookmarklets work, although you have to go through the bookmarks menu to get to them.
• Safari crashes are handled gracefully - the main screen fades back in, and you can jump right back into Safari. It will then load page you were visiting when it crashed.
• Drag and drop, and other behaviors based on picking up mousemove events, don’t work. CSS-based element drag and drop doesn’t work either. Dragging one finger around the iPhone’s version of Safari causes the window to scroll, and that’s it. I assume that scroll events do work. I’m sure somebody is already working on a version of drag and drop based on window scrolling.
• For documents with no width set, the iPhone uses a default width of 980px.

Joe Hewitt isn’t too happy with his experiments:

My first task has been exploring the DOM events that you can handle. You do not get “mousedown” when you touch the screen. You get “mousedown” and “mouseup” at the same time when you release your finger. The “mousemove” event does not seem to fire at all. There is no way to handle double-clicking because that is the action for zooming, and calling event.preventDefault() doesn’t seem to override that.

If Safari is the current SDK, we need help as developers to build, and debug, applications.

MySpace Likely To Open Platform To 3rd Party Developers

MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe has indicated that MySpace will likely open its platform to 3rd party developers, according to a report at FT.com

The move will see MySpace following in the footsteps of Facebook; Facebook’s wildly popular F8 release has seen in excess of 1000 additional applications made available to Facebook users and has driven enormous growth.

MySpace still maintains leadership in the social networking space based on user numbers and traffic, and has continued to grow; however there is little doubt today that the hearts and minds of the people who count have abandoned MySpace for Facebook. The moves to an open platform also comes after reports earlier this week claiming that DeWolfe was asking for a $12.5 million annual salary to stay on at MySpace. If DeWolfe can successfully play catch-up with Facebook he may end up being worth it.

Google Maps Now Does Interactive Re-Routing

An anonymous reader writes

"Remember how cool it was the first time you used MapQuest or Google Maps or Google Earth? You'll feel like it's the first time again, when you use interactive dragging of routes on Google Maps. Some of the folks from the development team have even whipped up a handy video to explain the concept."