A look back on 2009

2009 was a remarkable year for developers. Vic Gundotra, VP of our developer team declared at Google I/O, "The web has won!" and this year was full of launches and announcements that remind us how the web has become the platform of our day. We found lots of inspiration from the developers at Google I/O in San Francisco and at our Google Developer Days in Japan, China, Brazil, Russia and the Czech Republic.



Here's a look back at some of our favorite highlights from 2009:

• Faster Apps Faster - the theme for the recent Campfire One event letting developers know how GWT 2.0 decreases development time (it's being used by Google Wave & Adwords for this reason) and how Speed Tracer gives you new insight into speeding up your apps


• Make the Web faster - as part of an effort to Make the web faster we launched tools like Page-Speed and our DNS resolution service. We also made our internal JavaScript tools available, called Closure Tools, so you can rev up your js like the guys on Gmail. With PubSubHubbub all your feeds can be real-time streams.


• A faster browser - A few weeks ago we launched Google Chrome for Mac and Linux, along with an extension framework for Chrome and a gallery for developers to distribute their extensions -- there are over 900 to check out already! Chrome has a set of developer tools built on WebKit to help optimize your code. Plus, we released details of Chrome OS...a netbook operating system for speed freaks. Along the way, we've worked with the larger web community contributing to the exciting future of the web with HTML5.


• Mobile - Android launched on one device in one country on one carrier in 2008. This year, 20 devices in 26 countries on 32 carriers have been launched or announced. Developers have created over 16,000 apps in the Android Marketplace. Some were winners of our second Android Developer Challenge. We launched new mobile versions of gmail and calendar using HTML5. You can take a picture to search using Google Goggles and get turn-by-turn navigation with Google maps. Plus, we recently announced our mobile lab for Android hardware.


• Hosting - App Engine apps were allowed to scale beyond free quotas and Java developers were invited to try it out at Campfire 1 in April. Developers responded, with over 100K apps  built on App Engine. Open source developers using Project Hosting were able to host projects on Mercurial, in addition to Subversion.


• New APIs - Google Wave was released early to developers at Google I/O in May. Wave is "equal parts conversation and document" and showcases what is possible in the browser. Developers can build robot extensions to automate common tasks or build gadget extensions to provide a new way for users to interact. Google Maps released v3, Friend Connect got more personalized and then got cozy w/ Twitter, Google Analytics released an API and then added asynchronous tracking.


• Google Web Elements - From maps to search to translate and more, Google Web Elements made it even easier than ever to add Google products to your site.


• Labs - Google Code Labs was created to let developers know which APIs and products are cutting edge labs "experiments" and which we are committed to supporting for the long term.

It is a very exciting time to be a developer...we are just starting to see what is possible with the web as the platform. It will be a lot of fun to see where all of us, together, can take the web in 2010!

Happy Holidays from the Google Developer Team!

By Mike Marchak, on behalf of the Google Developer Team

Google Analytics API v2 Python Client Library

We know it's easier for developers to program in the languages they know. So we updated the Google Analytics API Python Client library with all the new API version 2 features and added reference exampels for both the Account Feed and Data Feed. Now it's easier than ever to automate your analysis workflow using our API.

Taking The Library For a Spin

With the updated library, we thought it would be a great time to highlight the power of the new v2 features. So we created a sample application to do just that. The application uses the new Google Analytics Python client library to retrieve metrics for a series of segments. It then performs some calculations on the data and creates bar charts using the GChartWrapper package, an open source Python wrapper for the Google Charts API. Finally, it uses the Python Imaging Library to add a title and legend, and stitches all the charts together into a single image. We decided to release this application as open source so you can create visualizations with your own data.

Solving Business Problems

With social media all the rage, we wanted to use this new application to help Avinash Kaushik, our Analytics Evangelist, to measure "engagement" on his popular Occam's Razor blog. We also wanted to determine if the time he spends participating in social media sites is valuable and sends new readers to his blog.

First we created segments to pull all the referrals from Facebook and Twitter. Second, we chose five calculations and corresponding metrics to compare the performance of thee two segments. We then compared the segments to each other and, for context, to all the visits to the site as a control.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, here are the results:



Let's Analyze

Some interesting observations become apparent.

• Far more visits originate from Twitter (3.6x) when compared to Facebook, perhaps not surprising given Avinash's Twitter followers (~16,120)
• Visitors from Twitter tend to be new visitors, a good thing, but they view fewer pages and spend significantly less time on the blog.
• On the other hand Facebook delivers an audience that is loyal. These visitors come back to the site more often and spend a significant time on the blog (compared to Twitter and all other visitors).

The bottom line? Even though social networking sites are all the rage, they actually contribute very little to Avinash's blog. If this blog were a company, it would be wise to ensure the time and effort put into driving traffic from social media is proportionate to the actual volume of traffic and goal conversions from those sites.

Hopefully this example shows how powerful our new features can be.

If you're interested in running this report against your own data, the application is free and open sourced. Additionally, we made it really easy to change the metrics, segments, calculations and all the other visual properties to power your own visualizations. So please download it here and give it a whirl, we would love to hear your feedback.

By Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

Introducing Google Browser Size

When I started work at Google, I visited the Google Earth team, hoping to find a 20% project on my favorite Google product. There I met Bruno Bowden, who introduced me to a problem I had never thought much about: how to take browser sizes into account when designing a page.

Bruno had noticed that many people who visit the “Download Google Earth” page never actually download, even though, as you can see, the button is pretty hard to miss:



He wondered if a significant number of users might have their browser windows too small to see the button:



To analyze this, Bruno looked at how large people's browser windows were when they visited this page. His first key idea was to measure not the entire browser window, but just the client area -- no toolbars, status bars, or other chrome.

Bruno's second key idea was to render several weeks' worth of page visitor browser sizes in a contour visualization:



Using this visualization, Bruno confirmed that about 10% of users couldn't see the download button without scrolling, and thus never noticed it. 10% may not sound like a lot, but in this context it turns out to mean a significant number of people weren't downloading Google Earth. Using this data, the team was able to redesign the page to good effect.

Bruno and I realized that Web designers might benefit from this information if it could be made more generally available. We constructed a page that could overlay a DIV containing the contour visualization atop an IFRAME containing any other Web page:



This turned out to be a good way to see which controls were and weren't visible at typical browser sizes. The only problem was, the overlay DIV prevented mouse events from getting to the page IFRAME, so it wasn't possible to interact with the page.

To solve this, we split the overlay DIV into four:



Each of the outlines above (red, yellow, blue, green) represents a separate DIV. As the mouse pointer moves, we resize and reposition the DIVs to leave a small window of blank space around the pointer, and adjust background offsets for each DIV to make the overlay look like one seamless graphic. (We originally did this on a timer, but we found a simpler way: when the mouse touches any of the DIVs, resize/reposition all of the DIVs.) End result: a designer can click and otherwise interact with the page with the mouse, and thus interact with the site normally instead of repeatedly typing in URLs.

We are now making this tool available to the public on Google Labs. To try it, simply visit browsersize.googlelabs.com and enter the URL of a page you'd like to examine. The size overlay you see is using latest data from visitors to google.com, so this should give you a pretty good indication of what parts of your UI are generally visible and what aren't.

We look forward to receiving your comments at browser-size-external-feedback!

By Arthur Blume on behalf of the Google Browser Size team

New Google Analytics API Features

Over the past few months we've received a lot of great feedback from our developers about what they wanted to see in the Google Analytics API. Today we're excited to announce new powerful and flexible features to the Google Analytics Data Export API including:

Support for Advanced Segments

With advanced segmentation, you can look beyond the totals and into the nuances of the data for your site. For example, the average time on site for all visits could be 60 seconds, but when you segment by country, you might learn that average time on site of visits from Poland is over 2 minutes.

So we've added two new ways to use advanced segments through the API:

1. Create them on the fly by specifying their expression directly through an API query.
2. Use advanced segments created in the Google Analytics web interface through the API.

This video describes exactly what advanced segments do and how you can use them with the API.



Goal 5-20 and Configuration Data

With the recent Google Analytics v4 launch enabling up to 20 goals, many of you asked for access to this valuable data, and we listened. Now there are 48 new metrics to access goal performance. We've also added all the goal configuration data, including name, type, step names for each profile.

Here's a great video describing the depth of the goal configuration data.



Custom Variables

Custom variables are powerful new ways to describe visitors, visits and pages within Google Analytics. In this new release, we've added 10 new dimensions to access custom variable data. In addition, every custom variable that you've used is now available through the Account Feed.

All the details of this release can be found on our public changelog and public notify group. We've updated all our documentatation at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics. Please continue to give us feedback to improve our product through our public google group.

Thanks!

By Nick Mihailovski on behalf of the Google Analytics API Team

Google Fusion Tables API

Today I'm excited to announce that Google Fusion Tables is releasing its own API.

What is Fusion Tables? A product launched recently in Google Labs, Fusion Tables is a free service for sharing and visualizing data online. It allows you to upload data, share and mark up your data with collaborators, merge data from multiple tables, and create visualizations like charts and maps.

Do you have data you need to share with other organizations? In Fusion Tables, you can share all or part of a table with other people. Does your data mean more when seen together with other datasets you don't own? By merging your data with other people's shared tables, you can see the whole picture in one place, discuss the data in embedded comments, and mark up the data with your collaborators. Fusion Tables keeps track of who contributed each part of the data and who has permission to edit.

Watch Circle of Blue's video description of how they use Fusion Tables to combine and visualize water data.



Often the real meaning and potential impact of a database can be hidden behind all the raw names and numbers, but a well-chosen visualization can bring the data to life. Fusion Tables has automatic data visualization built in: we've integrated with the Google Maps API and the Google Visualization API so you can view your data in maps, motion charts, and graphs. All of these can be embedded in your webpage, your Google Site, your blog...any Web page you want! The visualizations even update automatically as data is updated or corrected. Embed the visualization once, and the latest version will always be shown automatically.

Let other people help spot outliers and unexpected values in your dataset by linking them directly to data that is filtered, aggregated, and visualized for various angles of examination. Fusion Tables' data discussion features help you gather feedback from your community.

Is your dataset active, always changing? Is it being collected right now on cell phones or websites? With the new Fusion Tables API, you can update and query your dataset in Fusion Tables programmatically, without ever logging in to the Fusion Tables website. The API means you can import data from whatever data source you may have, whether a text file or a full-powered data base. On the more exotic side, imagine you're collecting data via survey software on GPS-enabled cell phones, as the Open Data Kit project is doing. Open Data Kit uses Google App Engine and the Fusion Tables API to instantly map locations of survey results.

Are you a data exhibitionist? Put your data in Fusion Tables and make it available for the world to see! Fusion Tables will maintain your attribution as your data participates in other tables, enforce your choices about sharing and exporting the data, and invite Google Web Search to index the table.

Fusion Tables allows datasets to play together in a safe, collaborative, and privacy-controlled environment. We can't wait to hear about the amazing things you will make happen with Fusion Tables.

By Anno Langen, Jayant Madhavan and Rebecca Shapley, Google Fusion Tables Team

Google Developer Days 2009 come to an end

We've concluded Google Developer Days 2009, a set of one-day developer events that travel around the world. This year, they started in Beijing, China on June 5 and ended in Moscow, Russia on November 10. At each event, attendees had the opportunity to learn about Google's newest web technologies with products such as Google Wave, Android, Chrome, Google Web Toolkit, OpenSocial, and App Engine. They also interacted with Google developers during "office hours" and had the chance to see how other developers are using Google technologies for their own applications at various demo areas.

We have finished posting the presentations and photos from our final events of the year, and hopefully each location's page will continue to be a useful resource for you. Thank you for making these such great events! We look forward to seeing you in 2010...

By Alyssa England Sachs, Google Developer Team

New features for Google Web Elements

Earlier this year we introduced Google Web Elements, an easy way to embed Google products on your site by simply copying and pasting a snippet of code. Today we're excited to announce the addition of three new Web Elements:

• Translate element
  
  The Translate element enables visitors to automatically translate your pages into their native language, extending the reach of your website to a global audience. Even better, it will know when their language doesn't match your site's. Have some multi-lingual visitors? Don't worry, they'll be able to turn it off completely.
  
  Note that whether or not the Translate element pops up is based on the language of your web browser. In order to test what other language visitors will see on your site, you'll have to follow the directions here to change your browser's language.



• Reader element
  
  The Reader element embeds the headlines from your recent shared items on Google Reader right on your website. You can customize the element by choosing how many items to show and the color scheme. The headlines shown in the Reader element will automatically update as you share or unshare items.








• Orkut element
  
  The Orkut element makes it easy for your website's visitors to share your site on their Orkut page. When visitors to your site click the button, they'll be able to share your website content with their Orkut friends with a couple clicks

We've also added a couple new features that we hope you'll enjoy:

• Custom Search element themes:  The Custom Search element lets visitors search your site (or other content defined by you) and enables you to earn revenue (via AdSense) from highly relevant ads that are displayed in the search results. You've always been able to richly style this element (we described a couple ways in this blog post), but that required knowing JavaScript and CSS. Now you can adjust the look and feel of the element to better integrate with your site, without having to code anything.


• Login integration:  The Google Web Elements website is now integrated with your Google account.  By logging in (if you're not logged in already), you'll be able to more easily select your Calendar, Presentation or Spreadsheet in creating your element.  Login is also required to personalize your Reader element.


• Document selector: Once logged into the Google Web Elements website, you'll be able to easily search through your data when creating a Calendar, Presentation or Spreadsheet element.  All you have to do is click the "Choose" button and select the one that you would like to use with your element.  You still have the option of pasting in a URL (for instance, if you wish to use a document not associated with your account), but this is no longer required.
  
  

We hope you enjoy these new additions to the Web Elements family! To get started, check out www.google.com/webelements.

By Christine Tsai, Web Elements Team

Google Web Toolkit 2.0 - now with Speed Tracer

Tonight at a Google Campfire One we released Google Web Toolkit 2.0, aiming to do two main things for developers:

• Make it easier to build faster apps
• Speed up the overall development cycle

This is a very exciting release because it's the cumulation of a year and a half working with teams like Google Wave, AdWords, and Orkut (among many others inside and outside of Google) to evolve GWT to meet the needs of today's web applications. There are many features and improvements, but let me call out three which we're especially excited about.

Faster Apps

Introducing: Performance profiling with Speed Tracer
The first thing you'll notice in 2.0 is that we've added a new tool called Speed Tracer. Speed Tracer is a performance profiler for Google Chrome that allows developers to see what's going on in a way which hasn't been possible before. We've worked closely with the Webkit community to add instrumentation in the browser to enable developers to gain deep insights into how code behaves, uncovering problems which have been hidden up till now.

Introducing: Incremental app download with code splitting
Another feature we've added into Google Web Toolkit is developer-guided code splitting. Code splitting allows a developer to split up their application for much, much faster startup times. Imagine if you have a settings page that users go to once a week. Why download that JavaScript when the application starts up? With code splitting, your users download just the JavaScript they need to get started.

Faster Development

Introducing: Declarative UI with UiBinder
UiBinder is a new declarative UI framework in Google Web Toolkit which enables rapid design iteration and a clean separation between presentation layer and application logic.

Dive into the details and more features in GWT 2.0.



By Andrew Bowers, GWT Product Manager

Google Chrome Extensions launched in beta!

Today, we launched Google Chrome's extensions system in the beta channel for Windows and Linux (Mac is in progress). We've also opened up our brand new gallery, which contains more than 300 extensions!

We aspired to create an extensions system that is easy to use, stable, more secure and that wouldn't slow down Google Chrome. We're really happy to release a beta that begins to deliver on our initial vision. If you want to learn more about Google Chrome extensions, you can start by reading our docs and joining our mailing list. You can also check out the videos below:



You can also meet us in person - let us know if you want to join us in a small get together tomorrow on our campus in Mountain View (or via VC in New York and Kirkland). Space is limited - we'd love to see many of you there so RSVP early and we'll email you more information if you are selected to attend. You can also meet the team at Add-on Con, where we will participate in a couple of panels.

Finally for those of you who are far away, we are planning some online developer tutorial sessions. If you are interested in attending, please fill in this form.

By Erik Kay and Aaron Boodman, Google Chrome Software Engineers

Google Translator Toolkit Data API

Today, we're excited to announce the release of the Google Translator Toolkit Data API. Translator Toolkit is a powerful but easy-to-use editor that enables translators to bring a human touch to machine translation through translation search, bilingual dictionaries, and custom terminology databases. Using Translator Toolkit, you can translate HTML, Word, AdWords, Wikipedia, and other documents in a WYSIWYG ("what-you-see-is-what-you-get") editor, share them with other users, and download their translations onto your desktop.

Through our new API, you can upload, share, download, and delete your documents, glossaries, and translation memories using the Google Data Protocol. That means that integrating human translation into your translators' workflow just got easier! Here are a few things you can do with the Translator Toolkit API:

• Automatically connect your content management system (CMS) with Translator Toolkit. You can transform your content into HTML files, protect sections of HTML from translation through the class="notranslate" attribute, upload the HTML files, share the files with your translators, download the translated HTML, and then transform and upload the documents back into your CMS.


• Automatically connect your file system with Translator Toolkit. You can create a cron job that uploads files into Translator Toolkit, shares the files with your translators, then downloads completed files back to the file system.

For now, the API is available in labs as we rapidly add features based on your feedback. Check out our documentation, where you'll find our Java client library and a developer guide to get you started. Please visit our new developer forum if you have questions.

By Mayank Gupta and Paneendra Ba, Google Translator Toolkit Team

Introducing Google Public DNS: A new DNS resolver from Google

Today, as part of our efforts to make the web faster, we are announcing Google Public DNS, a new experimental public DNS resolver.

The DNS protocol is an important part of the web's infrastructure, serving as the Internet's "phone book". Every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they complete loading. As a result, the average Internet user performs hundreds of DNS lookups each day, that collectively can slow down his or her browsing experience.

We believe that a faster DNS infrastructure could significantly improve the browsing experience for all web users. To enhance DNS speed but to also improve security and validity of results, Google Public DNS is trying a few different approaches that we are sharing with the broader web community through our documentation:

• Speed: Resolver-side cache misses are one of the primary contributors to sluggish DNS responses. Clever caching techniques can help increase the speed of these responses. Google Public DNS implements prefetching: before the TTL on a record expires, we refresh the record continuously, asychronously and independently of user requests for a large number of popular domains. This allows Google Public DNS to serve many DNS requests in the round trip time it takes a packet to travel to our servers and back.


• Security: DNS is vulnerable to spoofing attacks that can poison the cache of a nameserver and can route all its users to a malicious website. Until new protocols like DNSSEC get widely adopted, resolvers need to take additional measures to keep their caches secure. Google Public DNS makes it more difficult for attackers to spoof valid responses by randomizing the case of query names and including additional data in its DNS messages.


• Validity: Google Public DNS complies with the DNS standards and gives the user the exact response his or her computer expects without performing any blocking, filtering, or redirection that may hamper a user's browsing experience.

We hope that you will help us test these improvements by using the Google Public DNS service today, from wherever you are in the world. We plan to share what we learn from this experimental rollout of Google Public DNS with the broader web community and other DNS providers, to improve the browsing experience for Internet users globally.

To get more information on Google Public DNS you can visit our site, read our documentation, and our logging policies. We also look forward to receiving your feedback in our discussion group.

By Prem Ramaswami, Public DNS Team

Deeper integration for Friend Connect and Twitter

Did you hear that Friend Connect and Twitter are more closely integrated than ever? To learn more, check out our post on the Social Web Blog.

By James Reilly, Google Friend Connect Team

Google Analytics Launches Asynchronous Tracking

Today we're excited to announce our new Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking Code snippet as an alternative way to track your websites! It provides the following benefits:

• Faster tracking code load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution
• Enhanced data collection & accuracy
• Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn't fully loaded

Here is the JavaScript source of the new tracking snippet:

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script');
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 
        'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    ga.setAttribute('async', 'true');
    document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(ga);
  })();

</script>

The first part of the asynchronous tracking code snippet assigns the _gaq variable to a JavaScript array. After that, two tracking API calls (encoded as arrays) are pushed onto _gaq. When the tracking code initializes, it transforms the _gaq object from a standard array into a new object and executes all the tracking API calls initially collected in the array. With this feature, you can immediately store all necessary tracking calls even before the Google Analytics tracking code is downloaded! No more worrying about race conditions or dependency issues on the ga.js tracking code.

The second half of the snippet provides the logic that loads the tracking code in parallel with other scripts on the page. It executes an anonymous function that dynamically creates a <script> element and sets the source with the proper protocol. As a result, most browsers will load the tracking code in parallel with other scripts on the page, thus reducing the web page load time. Note here the forward-looking use of the new HTML5 "async" attribute in this part of the snippet. While it creates the same effect as adding a <script> element to the DOM, it officially tells browsers that this script can be loaded asynchronously. Firefox 3.6 is the first browser to officially offer support for this new feature. If you're curious, here are more details on the official HTML5 async specification.

Once loaded, the tracking code, transforms the _gaq array into an Analytics _gaq object. This object acts as a wrapper for the underlying _gat object and executes all the commands, sending data to your Google Analytics account. Your page code can ignore this fact though, because the _gaq.push syntax can be used at any time. See the Asynchronous Tracking Usage Guide for more details.

The new tracking code is now in Beta and available to all Google Analytics users. Keep in mind that use of the code is also optional: all your existing Google Analytics code will continue to work as-is should you decide not to adopt the new tracking method. But if you want to improve the speed of your website and the increase accuracy of your Analytics data, then we think you'll love this new option.

Learn more about this new tracking code in our Google Code developer docs and get started with our migration guide.

By Brian Kuhn, Google Analytics Team