What is Google Campfire One?
Every once in a while, we invite members of the developer community on campus to talk shop, share some news, and eat S'mores. We call this series of events, "Google Campfire One."
We announced OpenSocial at our first Campfire One back in November 2007, and we're looking forward to discussing other yet-to-be-announced products and initiatives at future gatherings. In the mean time, feel free to browse past events (below), or checkout related sessions at Google I/O, our upcoming developer conference in San Francisco (May 28-29, 2008).
Grow traffic with easy-to-add social features
As a webmaster, you may have tried adding social features to your site — from comments, to ratings and reviews, to photo uploaders. Building this kind of functionality can be quite difficult, however, and visitors are less and less likely to create a new friends list just to use your website.
Introducing Google Friend Connect
Google Friend Connect enables webmasters to quickly and easily enhance their site with community features; what's more, these features leverage visitors' existing social ties. By simply copying and pasting a few lines of JavaScript, you can implement the social functionality you want, and visitors can connect with their Facebook, orkut and other friends directly on your website.
Less work, more traffic
Google Friend Connect offers an array of social applications built by Google, and the OpenSocial developer community — webmasters need only choose the ones they want. With minimal effort, you'll have a more compelling, interactive website that'll keep visitors (and their friends) coming back.
Learn more about Google Friend Connect >>
Run your web apps on Google's infrastructure
If you've ever tried building and deploying a web app, you've no doubt realized — like we have — that the upfront infrastructure costs and challenges are significant. From writing Apache configs, to setting up monitoring, to finding machines (including money to pay for them!), launching a live service isn't for the faint of heart.
Introducing Google App Engine
Google App Engine enables developers to build their web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google's own apps. (This way, you can focus on what's really important: designing and launching a great product.)
Easy to start, easy to scale
Out of the box, developers have access to Google App Engine's free quota of 500MB in persistent storage, and 5M monthly pageviews. With a fully-integrated development environment, Google App Engine also makes it easy to grow your web app from one to millions of users, without the infrastructure headache.
(Note: Beginning April 7th, we're extending a preview release of Google App Engine — with free quota — to the first 10,000 interested developers.)
Learn more about Google App Engine >>
The web is better when it's social
If you've been involved in web development, you've noticed the continued trend towards more social applications. The web is definitely more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. With this trend has also come a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.
Introducing OpenSocial
OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. Using standard JavaScript and HTML, they enable developers to create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds.
Many sites, one API
Common APIs mean you only have to learn once in order to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications.