Googlified

Google Maps today added 13 more cities and a national park to Street View. The new cities are Albuquerque, Anchorage, Austin, Cleveland, Fairbanks, Little Rock, Madison, Nashville, Rockford, Richmond, Spokane, St. Petersburg, Tampa, and the Yosemite National Park. The Google LatLong Blog noted that they have expanded coverage in 6 of their existing cities.

Also, the Google Maps API now has support for Street View. I am sensing a series of games coming out soon based on the Street View API, but I would hate to wait 5 minutes for the Street View images to load (for the game). [ loading scene … 5% - approx. 2 hrs left ]

Traditionally, translating a blog post requires sending your readers to translation services, such as Google Translate and Babel Fish. However, with the revolutionary Google Language API, you can offer content in several languages right on your website now and better experience for the readers.

Due to the fact that I have too much free time during the Spring Break, I wrote a small piece of JavaScript code that uses the API to translate posts on this blog. You can test it out on this blog. It works in Windows’ version of Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9, and Safari 3, but it should work wherever the Google Language API works (but works better in FF & Opera in my tests).

Well, if you also want to have this cool tool on your site, I packed all the necessary files that you need to set the thing up into a 10kB .zip file, which included the script itself, a readme file, and a couple of flag icons by Mark James of Famfamfam.

Once again, this is not the greatest solution, but it works - brought to you by Haochi.

The Google Code team released add two new APIs to the AJAX API family this week, the Visualization API and Language API. The Google Visualization API enables users to use the API to create visualizations from raw data using SQL-like queries with the API and it is integrated into Google Spreadsheet so that you can include the visualizations in the Spreadsheet.

The other one, Google Language API, offers language translation and detection for all the languages that Google Translate supports - currently at 13 language and 29 language pairs. Basically, they stole the idea that I stole from them. :) Of course, they got everything covered.

YouTube released an updated version of its API. The new features are:

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube: Allows third party websites/applications to upload videos to YouTube and community features like rating videos, post comments and post video responses.
• Add/Edit user and video metadata
• Fetch localized standard feeds
• Customize player UI and control video playback: Lets users to customize the player by adding parameters specified by the API at the end of the URL, including the options for autoplay, looping, and keyboard control.

A JavaScript and ActionScript API were also introduced. They enabled developers to control the YouTube video and get information of the video, such as the video’s size, length, volume.

The Google Enterprise Blog announced today that they launched a “new” product,

We’re excited to announce a new product designed specifically for businesses who want to put Google Maps on their website: Google Maps API Premier.

However, the “new” product turns out to be the very same product that they launched one and a half years ago, with the name “Google Maps for Enterprise“.

110% not cool.

The Google Maps team today released a new API today that doesn’t require scripting. Basically you just have to create a parameterized URL according to the documentation, (or simply copy & paste the URL you created using the wizard), then copy & paste the URL in a HTML <img> tag and off you go. :)

There’s a query limit of “1000 unique image requests per user per day” and a size limit of 512×512 pixels. I created something similar like over a year ago that doesn’t have the query limit (I think) and the size limit is 2000*2000 pixels - about 15x of the official one, but the downside is it doesn’t offer all those fancy markers.

I don’t think it will be that hard to overcome the official limits, by either using CSS or server-side (or whatever you think is a better approach) to combine several images together.

Google released a new API called Social Graph API today, allowing users of the API to find out the “public connections (friends, coworkers, etc.)” of a URL (of a blog, social networking profile, sgnodemapper, etc.), email address. The information are determined by the “XFN, FOAF markup and other publicly declared connections” on the web page. You can specify the API to return either URLs that are linking to your input URL or URLs that you (your input URL) are linking to.

Here are some example applications Google created and this is a sample data of other sites linking to some of my social networking site profiles and my personal website (shameless linking!).

I am going to spend a few hours to play with it, see what cool things I can come up with. :)

Jeff Fisher of the Google Data APIs Team released a sample application (for Windows users) to manage your documents on Google Docs. You can use the DocList Uploader to upload multiple documents at once, as well as deleting documents.

Since this application is used to demonstrate the functionalities of the Documents List Data API, there’s an article on Google Code “detailing the construction of the sample.”

Google today released a new API that you can create your own themes for iGoogle (though it has to be approved by Google before getting into the iGoogle themes directory, but you can still test the theme by “adding ?skin=<theme-url> at the end of the iGoogle URL”).

Creating a iGoogle theme is really easy, as Jesse Shieh from the Google Code Blog put it, “If you can create a webpage, then you can create a theme.” Google even packs all the basic files you need for creating a theme in a ZIP file to help starters. I bet someone’s already building a web-base dummy-proof iGoogle theme creator. Getting a nice header image and coming up with a good color scheme is the hard part.

[Check out this crappy theme I created in under 5 minutes]

Sooner or later, some iGoogle home pages will just be as beautiful as my friends’ profile pages on MySpace.

When Google released its Chart API, I suggested them to build a tool (or something) to simplify the process of creating the charts, instead of the laborious way of adding values to a URL. Soon after the release of the API, several chart makers were created, including the ChartMaker by Googler Almaer Dion.

The best so far (AFAIK), is this script written by Chris Heilmann (who works at Yahoo!). The JavaScript code coverts HTML tables into pie charts (demo). Currently, the script only works with pie charts, but I can see that with a little improvement of the script it can do a lot more.

[via Ajaxian]

Google today released a new API called the Chart API, which can be used to generate, well, charts and graphs. Unlike other Google APIs, I think this is easier for the general audience - after all, it just generate a chart and return in (PNG) image format which you can embed in your web page using the simple img tag. The above chart was created by calling:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart
?cht=p
&chd=t:4,2,1
&chs=400x140
&chl=Haochi ate this slice|For you|For my snow man

Where cht=p tells the API to return the chart in pie chart format, cht=t:4,2,1 represents the values of the chart, chs=400x140 is the size of the chart in pixels, and chl=Haochi ate this slice ... snow man is the labels to the values sated previously.

Of course, this is only a simple demo on what the API can do. You can created line graph, bar graph, venn diagram, and pie charts and specific difference sizes, colors and labels for them with the API.

There are some restrictions on using this API: a limit of 50,000 queries per “user” (supposedly per domain, but it’s unclear) during a 24-hour period and that the charts cannot have a area of greater than 300,000 pixels with the maximum for height or width of 1000 pixels.

Google should build a tool, like Create a Graph, to simplify the process of creating these charts, especially those with a lot of data (well, people should use something else then, but I am just saying). If you are interested on using, or building applications with the Chart API, you can learn more about it on its website.

Google just released an press release saying that Open Social is launching tonight (Google Time) and developers can start writing Open Social applications. They also announced that MySpace will be part of this, in addition to the previously mentioned Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

The links to Open Social is currently returning “404 Not Found”, but you should be able to see something there soon (hopefully).

UPDATE: The site is now alive but the API doesn’t seem to be working (or maybe because you need to sign up first). Also, there’s a new blog from Google dedicated to this API. For whatever reason, ValleyWag’s “Google’s OpenSocial is a PR scam” sounds quite reasonable to me.