Google Homepage API Released
Google has done it again! I had recently switched from google/ig to netvibes because of a few small features that netvibes had (namely the rss reader widget and the web stickies widget) but it looks like I’ll soon be switching back to google/ig.
They have released an API for the google homepage that allows pretty much anybody to make custom widgets for the online app. This should mean great things for its users because it won’t be long until there are a plethora of really useful apps that are developed by our favorite companies as well as private users.
The API couldn’t be more simple; for those that already have little webapps that they offer to the public, adding them to the google homepage as a widget is as simple as writing a small XML doc that points to the app. I have even already been toying with the API and within 5 minutes I had my google/ig running a custom widget. Granted it didn’t do much, but it goes to show just how easy it is to hook in to the API.
My only qualm with the ig API is that it doesn’t provide a way for developers to store user information on google’s servers. (I was thinking that google might impliment a userprefs.xml document that developers could use to write their appdata to) So if someone (like me) was inclined to write something like a stickie note module (which I was) they would have to host the database on their own server, which really isn’t that feaseable for a private developer with shared hosting (if the app gets popular it’ll destroy their bandwith without really increasing their site traffic). So google, get on extending that API with some sort of database or the ability to write appdata to your servers and we’ll talk!
You can view the googleblog post on this here.
Or you can dive right in.
Furthermore, you can check out what new modules are available here.
