Global Moxie

Google chopper. Photo by Josh Clark.

Yesterday I spent a thought-provoking afternoon and evening at the Paris installment of Google Developer Day. The gist: Google invited 1600 developers to attend events in 10 cities around the world for workshops about Google's various programming interfaces and services.

And they gave remote-controlled helicopters to all 200 developers here in Paris. Excellent.

My only disappointment was that none of the sessions here offered much detail about Google's freshly unveiled beta products. As most hardcore web geeks know by now, Google launched three new services this week:

• The Mapplets feature lets you create widgets ("gadgets" in googlespeak) within the Google Maps site to overlay custom data on Google Maps.

• The mashup editor lets you create original web apps by combining web services (e.g., maps, search, Google Base) with just a few lines of code.

• And most interesting of all: Gears is a browser plugin that enables supporting web apps to let you work offline, syncing the web data to your local computer. Down the road, in other words, I could make it possible to let you edit your Big Medium content even when you're offline.

Alas, those were mentioned only in passing at the Paris event, where sessions focused on more established web services and APIs. There was still plenty of food for thought, and the event helped me to flesh out some previously vague feature ideas for Big Medium.

I still need to get the initial release of Big Medium 2.0 out the door before I can implement these features, but it was exciting to find some concrete implementation ideas for these v2.1 possibilities.

Maps

Jean-François Wassong presented the Google Maps API. Photo by Josh Clark.

I've long had vague and hazy plans for adding maps to Big Medium, allowing you to add a Google map with your own pushpin locations and notations to any page. I'm now more sure than ever that this will be a feature, or at least a plugin. This has obvious utility for news sites, but also handy for contact pages and location finders for corporate sites.

For the interface, adding a map to a page would be similar to adding an image gallery now. You would click "add map location" and enter the address (or select an existing location from the library). Add as many locations as you like, and Big Medium would generate a map displaying all of your locations; clicking one of them would show your description of the place. And of course, you'd be able to do the usual zooming and scrolling that you can always do in Google Maps.

The possibilities for the behind-the-scenes data formats are also interesting. It's been a while since I've dipped into the Google Maps API, and I hadn't realized that you could create an external XML file (specifically, Google's KML file format) that describes your map locations for Google Maps. This is cool for two reasons.

First, Google will index these files, making your map information available for searches in Google Maps. Publishing a map of London's Banksy graffiti in Big Medium, for example, would likewise let others find those locations, linked to your site, by searching for "banksy in london" at Google Maps.

Second, these KML files also describe maps in Google Earth, Google's groovy 3D map software. That means that Big Medium could also offer links to your locations to open up in Google Earth for visitors who have the software installed. (And that's a lot of people... Interesting stat from yesterday: Google Earth's 200 million downloads apparently make it the most downloaded software in the history of the net.) See Google France's 3D visualization of the French presidential results for an idea of the possibilities.

Atom format

I'm eventually going to add a public API for editing Big Medium content from third-party applications, including blog editors like Mars Edit or Ecto. Before yesterday, I hadn't yet given a lot of thought to exactly what protocol I'd use for that, but spending a day with Google's APIs, GData in particular, convinces me that the Atom publishing protocol is the easy choice. This is probably a few months off at least, but the day gave me some welcome clarity on that decision.

Offline editing

Like a lot of people, I'm very interested in the possibilities of the new Google Gears browser plugin, allowing web apps to sync data with local computers for offline work.

Gears at least provides the pipe to make this possible, but there's a lot of work involved to integrate that pipe into an app like Big Medium. For now, there are more pressing priorities for finishing Big Medium 2. But I'll be watching closely how other apps make use of the new functionality and the degree to which users find it useful. (Not everyone's convinced that offline editing is a priority.)

A good day

As with all types of work, software development benefits from perspective. I get a lot from these opportunities to step out of my own code and look at what others are doing. This is especially true since it's clear that interaction between sites figures heavily in the future of the web. Mixing third-party services into Big Medium's feature set is just plain exciting. The possibilities seem endless (which is at once thrilling and, I must confess, vaguely paralyzing).

So yeah, Google Developer Day, I dig it. Next up, Yahoo and the BBC: Here I come, Hack Day.

Tags: bigmedium, conference, google, maps, search, toys, webservices