I spent my youth writing games on a computer hooked up to my parents' television but despite saving my pennies to buy a 300-baud modem, I was never able to realize my dream of writing a game that my best friend and I could play against each other on two computers. In all my games the I,J,K and M keys were used by player 1 while player 2 was stuck with W,A,S and Z on the same keyboard.
This was in the back of my mind when I started putting my 20% time towards building a simple javascript library on top of our Google Talk web client. After some demos, my 20% project grew to an 80% project, and we're now ready to show off -- and get feedback on -- the gadgets.realtime set of APIs. These APIs will let Google gadgets hosted in different user's browsers communicate with each other. The first API, gadgets.sharedstate, is available on the new Talk Developer Sandbox. With this API, you can share an object between instances of a gadget, and be notified in realtime when the other instance modifies it. More APIs and UI improvements to allow gadgets.realtime gadgets to be used on orkut and iGoogle are in the works and coming soon.
For more information and for sample applications, see the documentation.
We've set up a discussion group to collect feedback. So, help me out, fellow geeks! Try out this API and let me know what you think and share any cool gadgets you write.
Moishe Lettvin, Software Engineer
Attention Nerds! A new gadgets API for communication
Thursday, May 28, 2009 9:35 AM
Update (4/12/10): Our team decided to stop working on the gadgets.sharedstate API. The sandbox and the test harness will be shut down soon. Thanks for giving it a try.
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Show your Talk buddies where you are
Monday, May 04, 2009 12:04 PM
Google Latitude is a service that allows you to see where your friends are on a map in real time. You can choose whether to share your location with any or all of your friends and can display what you are up to with a status messages. And now there is a new feature that makes it easy to automatically share your location with your Google Talk buddies. Read more on the Google Apps blog.
Brian Hutchins
Product Marketing Manager
