Killing Mind

Within the first five minutes of being at the venue I'm insprired. There are a bunch of screens around the mingling area, slideshowing through various services built using Google technology. So many "of course!" and "that's cool!" ideas. dudewhereismyusedcar matches (mashes-up!) the used cars ads of some website with the Google maps data for America to allow you to view the location of all cars for sale in your area. jcastle shows you the location of all the castles in Japan, along with their details. There's jogging and walking type services that allow you to plot and share your routes.

Suddenly I'm thinking Newcastle could be taken by storm - why not Hunter region personals, car sales, garage sales, weather, surf, accommodation, bus routes, events, all plotted on a Google Map. Why not take the data of 4Sale2Buy, who I can only imagine would love to have their service boom, and plot it on Google maps? Everyone is aware of the frustration of listing and finding accommodation in Newcastle - why not improve the Uni's accommodation database, and combine it with Google Groups. Imagine if exchange students could jump online, look at where the accommodation is available and plot the bus routes from their house of interest to the uni. In some US cities, you can even plot the location of recent crime on the map, to evaluate your area. The mind boggles. I need a month just to play with some ideas.

Sydney is the first location in Google's world-wide developer day. There will be about 10 other locations throughout the day, as the world wakes up, culminating in the final show at San Jose. In Sydney, there were 700 people who registered, making it the 2nd largest event by response. I thoroughly expected more interest. This is Google! They have the hip image set in concrete. It's like crack for programmers. Oh well, all better for me.

The MC is James O'Loghlin (of New Inventors fame). He introduced the Keynote speaker, Alan Noble, Engineering Director of Google Australia. He had a hand waving session about Google's products, some key technologies, the new web app development model, where Google is trying to work with the community and push their technology, APIs and data, and a few ideas of how we can contribute. The word "mashup" annoys me a little, and this man used it more than "um", which is saying something.

Next up is Aaron Boodman, the dude who wrote Greasemonkey! He started as a musician, but gave that up to learn programming, leading to bunch of AJAX stuff. He now works at Google on the Gears (offline web apps) project.

Man, didn't anyone tell this guy that starting your presentation with an apology about being nervous and not being good at talking to people, is not a good way of starting, regardless of the truth? Sure enough, he started nervous, but got on a roll and found his groove by talking about his work. Turns out this Gears stuff is quite interesting. The whole idea is that if you write your web app with Gears, your users can access the application even if they are offline. When they come back online, the synchronisation happens in the background (in a pretend thread-like model that Javascript was hacked into performing). Very scary, because you are literally installing a database on everyone's computer, for every web app they use, and the offline/online transistion is seamless. Interesting nonetheless.

Now we have the second real session, where some young dude with a PhD in Geography from Leeds in the UK, who is talking about mapplets - hooking together people's "mashups" (relevant information on Google map locations, or tools for use on the maps) and the Google maps service. Basically just integration all the cool hacks people have done with Google Maps.

Time for the first break. There's now a screen scrolling through what I imagine are recent searches through the Google search engine. I know there are screens at Google HQ that do something similar. Who would have thought a white text on black background scrolling display could be so intriguing. So many emotions poor past - students stuck on assignment questions, travellers excited about visiting new regions, computer users faced with errors, someone looking for wife stories...

Mashup, mashup, mashup. Grrr. As I understand it, this word originally found a place in the audio scene, where people mixed the sounds of different sources, and claimed they had invented something new. Generally of course, the result was a poorly planned mess of discordant "music", but as fads go, it was a persistant one. In fact, much of the DJ business is about pretending you're clever by combining the artwork of others. Reminds me of the Apple Ad spoof here:

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/freitasm/839

Anyway, in the last couple of years the "blogosphere" has been spewing out this "mashup" word wherever possible. It's one of those buzzwords that has become cliche even before it has been defined. The podcasters made a mess of it first, using it describe any podcast that combined elements from different sources. Now in the Web 2.0 world it is being used to describe any combination of sources on a web page. You know, like the way many web pages have been for years. But now it's cool. Freakin' mashup. Mash on.

Bell's ringing, funky music is on, which means the next session is imminent. Now Bo Majewski is up and running up through the Google Maps API. A fairly technical presentation about the interface to the Maps, allowing for overlays, markers and controls.

Lunch! Like a bull in a china shop, I hit the stalls. I consider myself of sufficient self-control, until I'm presented with free food. A delicious selection of beef rolls, chicken noodles, curry and hot dogs means I have to try it all. Eh, I'm so stuffed now. James O'Loghlin found himself alone for a minute in my presence, so referring to a comment he made earlier about looking for someone to fix his printer, I showed him the shirt I was wearing - "No, I will not fix your computer". He found that amusing.

Next session after lunch sees Zhen Wang, who is running us through Google Gadgets. Oh my, yet another way to write embeddable web apps. Apparently these ones work on iGoogle (of course) as well as Google Desktop, Vista's Sidebar and Apple's Dashboard. Assuming no platform specific extensions, is it literally a case of putting a different wrapper on your existing Widget/Gadget, and having it deployable anywhere? Don't know yet. I see at least Google are taking care of browser specific issues - yay! For example, instead of the extraordinarily complex embed/object tag for Flash, you call a Google javascript function.

Zhen finished his uncomfortable presentation quickly, and now Lars Rasmussen is covering the good stuff - Open Source, Google APIs, Google Web Toolkit. Finally, a confident, solid presentation. Lots of good stuff - Google have an enormous mass of open source libraries, and many, many API's to check out if doing any web development. And GWT: here's the ticket - web dev sucks because 1) browser quirks, 2) no modern IDE, 3) scripting languages don't scale to teams/large projects. GWT he reckons, fixes that. 1) Google have taken care of quirks, in fact, they only send the client the necessary markup for their environment! 2) It's in Java! So Eclipse will see you through, 3) It's in Java! There's plenty of teams using Java.

The last couple of couple of sessions are on GData and KML. Getting a little dry and tired now. Some interesting demonstrations, and some fascinating potentials for applications... but not much is actually getting done by sitting and watching the presentation. Easier to sit here than change the world though ;) almost beer o'clock!

With a bit of networking, some beers and finger food, Google Developer Day 2007 is finished for Sydney. A very worthwhile day in the end, primarily so because of the inspiration offered by seeing the simple, useful, technically cool Google "mashup" applications gaining popularity. I've always wanted to get into web applications for myself, and now I feel I've been shown the way.