DevDots

I started off today thinking that I would spend most of my time focused on the Google App Engine and Android Sessions. But a couple things during the Keynote caused me to change my mind. First they announced the pricing for the Google App Engine and said they won’t start charging until the end of the year (which makes me think its still very very premature). Second, they showed Android during the Keynote, and while it looked good, they didn’t say anything about actual hardware/carriers (I was hoping they would today). But lastly, and most importantly, they presented these numbers…

• Why should you be interested in OpenSocial?
  • Sept 07
    • 0 Potential Users
    • 0 Developers
    • 0 Application Installs
  • Today (only 9 months later)
    • 275 Million Users
    • 20K Developers
    • 50 Million application installs

Plus they listed all of the confirmed OpenSocial containers. Hi5, Bebo, Yahoo, MySpace, iGoogle, LinkedIn, etc.

OpenSocial

So, it became clear to me that the OpenSocial sessions would be the most interesting and might provide me with info and skills that I could use now.

And actually they did for the most part. I attended one “intro to OpenSocial” which gave me a good overview of the terms and concepts. Here is my Executive and Technical summary:

• Executive Summary:
  
  • We should consider creating OpenSocial apps for our sites… or we may want to turn some of our sites into Containers and let others run apps inside our site.
  • Audience: 275 Million in 9 months.
• Tech Summary:
  • OpenSocial API is built on top of the Google Gadgets API.
  • OpenSocial Apps are rendered in an IFrame (slightly more “heavy weight” but more secure and easier to adapt to).
  • Facebook apps are rendered in div after html sanitization.
  • OpenSocial App’s look and feel will diverge. FaceBook apps will not.

I also attended a 2 hour code deep dive and built a basic OpenSocial app. Here are the steps we followed:

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/articles/tutorial/io.html

That tutorial is pretty poorly written… so it was good to be able to ask the authors questions in person.

The other OpenSocial session I attended (briefly) was given by the CTO of iLike. He’s built and scaled FaceBook apps and OpenSocial apps. My interesting takeaways from that was A) they use rails for everything and B) he thinks OpenSocial’s approach lends itself more to moving computation to the client side and will ultimately be more scalable because of it.

The other two sessions I attended were a bit random.

Under the Covers

One was a “Look under the covers at Google.” It was jam packed full of people. But nothing new was uncovered. They talked about their various software systems that let them run distributed apps efficiently on commodity hardware (i.e. Google File System, MapReduce, and BigTable). The Oregon data center was mentioned multiple times which made me happy.

Google Gears

And the last random session I attended was a look ahead at Google Gears++. They showed how Google Gears will be used (in the future) to allow web apps to.

1. Create desktop icons
2. Popup nice desktop notifications
3. Access the native OS File System Dialogs for multiple file selection.
4. Work with binary data in javascript (Blob)

I was hoping to hear them say that Google Gears was going to help web apps “use the webcam”, or “take a screenshot”, or “connect via P2P to other browsers.” But nothing innovative was mentioned. Those four things they listed are boring honestly… And I have high hopes that Yahoo’s BrowserPlus will end up blowing gears out of the water. (disclaimer: I contributed a little to BrowserPlus while at Y!)

Lastly… Videos of all the sessions will be posted next week here:

http://code.google.com/io