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Google Gadgets Come to You
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo is reporting the release of "Google Gadgets", 1,220 dynamic applications for use on your web pages, without needing to connect to Google. 'Google Gadgets range from a miniature look-up for Google Maps or Google Calendar to independent applications ranging from financial information to sports to communication tools and jokes, horoscopes or geometric puzzle game Tetris.'"
... I love the irony of Yahoo reporting this.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Google r0xx0rz!
http://naerey.switch-case.org
So...It's basically MySpace-type crap then?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
"Yahoo is reporting the release of Google Gadgets".
Throw MSN into it as well next time. The brain-explody will reach much further and stain more carpet.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Ok, so they have their standard disclaimer, but I saw a "Smiley of the Day" gadget from hotbar.com on offer on the first page of that.
Doesn't anyone at Google QC this stuff?
First thoughts are after seeing that - I'm not going to trust ANY of that stuff on websites I have anything to do with.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Wake me when there's a googol of them.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Those are simple RSS content being export. Do you remember Active Desktop and Push technology>
I was going to make a Soviet Yahoo pun . . . but my heart's just not in it.
Apparently, Google news didn't think this was news worthy. http://news.google.com/
When it comes to pastry theft, I take the cake.
Why yes. Yes you are.
It's just a depository of Gadgets, which doesn't mean they made them. Like the things you can find on the google search engine, they didn't make those pages, they just made them easily accessible.
http://naerey.switch-case.org
in Opera browser since v.9.0 ... see the following page:
http://widgets.opera.com/
Opera rox!
"turning espresso into code..."
Nope, there are at least two posts above your that do as well. :)
The deal with these things is, they work with Google Desktop Search, and they pop up when you hit SHIFT-SHIFT.
Some of them are pretty cool, and some are a pain in the ass. Several I've tried are downright buggy, and I have some serious questions about security.
You really don't know what you're getting into when you download and allow random code to freely run on your PC. I would assume the gadgets run with the same privileges as GDS itself. Or are they sandboxed?
Anyway, it sure is handy to know I've made 219,430 keystrokes and 26,690 mouse clicks since Thursday. Oh, and that it's warm and sunny outside. And that my battery is charged. Well, the scratch pad is nice. It always auto-saves.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Go, go, gadget google!
I've been looking for something like this for a while now. With the exception of SQL and a bit of HTML, I have little programming experience. This link: http://www.google.com/apis/homepage/synd.html shows you how to insert the code into your pages. Just an FYI!
In Soviet Russia, Gadgets Google YOU!
The news is that they've released a means to put them on non-Google web-pages; "Google Gadgets" have been around for a while for Google Desktop, the Google Personalized Homepage, and Google Pages.
I guess they could have called them "Wadgets"? What about "Widgetts"?
FTFA: "Google Gadgets, which have previously been available for users to add to a Web user's personalized Google homepage or their own computers via Google Desktop software, are now available for Web page owners to add to their own sites."
...who read the title as "Google gadgets come to get you"?
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
Reading. Comprehension. From TFA: "Google Gadgets, which have previously been available for users to add to a Web user's personalized Google homepage or their own computers via Google Desktop software, are now available for Web page owners to add to their own sites." (Emphasis mine.)
geometric puzzle game Tetris
The expression No shit, Sherlock springs to mind...
Also, please congratulate me on my first "Come on, this is slashdot" rant!
Anyone else see the irony in this story's blurb here on /.?
"Yahoo is reporting the release of 'Google Gadgets'..."
Coffee is my drug of choice.
you are
Actually, Reuters is reporting it. Yahoo! is simply syndicating it.
I'm glad the submitter saw fit to explain what Tetris is, otherwise we'd all be scratching our heads.
Maybe you should move along to the article and actually read it before making yourself look like a fool in front of thousands of nerds. Oh wait this is Slashdot, not even the editors bother reading the articles.
But they didn't put in a working link. Here it is: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open/
Not that I agree with the Belgian government, but this makes it easy to see why they don't want Google to display their news. If this story gets put up like this on a popular edited Web site like Slashdot, it would appear to be safe to assume that many people believe that Google News, Yahoo! News, and MSN news are all authoring their own stories.
I would think having a published API would be more important than the number of already available gadgets.
TFA had the wrong link... http://www.google.com/apis/homepage/synd.html is right. Seems like a neat idea. Aside from the Google icon and 'footnote.' which could detract from it being useful. I saw a use for these as a menu on a site or a nice customizable RSS display. This seems the best way yet to run /. And other feed headlines on my site. More than one a page might be annoying with the branding but time will tell.
It would be far more useful if you could inline and store data.
It looks to me like this is just a ripoff of WebPasties only with more numerous but simpler gadgets.
Doesn't that sound a bit verbose? Really, anybody reading this sort of article knows what Tetris is already...
I know, I know, I'm offtopic.
Even more reasons to disable javashit!
Sports? Jokes? Tetris? Horoscopes? Google is like, from the future!
I just wish a few of them were more customizable.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Yahoo helps Google Gadgets come to YOU!
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open/
It has the ability to track users, while the tracking is not on by default, plenty of other toolbars with the same functionality or without tracking functionality is marked as spyware by AdAware, Symantac, etc...
"Before these mini-Web based applications can go mainstream, however, Google and the others will have to do away with the need to "cut and paste" code and make it possible to install such programs on Web sites in a few clicks"
Please! Cut and paste is too complicated to create a website? Hello?
This is in fact something I like about google : they try to be friendly to joe average user, but not to the point of thinking all their users are brain-dead.
...
When I was young we used to write all our html from scratch, using vi, on a vt100. And we didn't complain!
I noticed that the height of these buggers (that's what I'm calling them) is limited to 157 pixels if you place them on an XHTML page -- even if you specify a different height. I'm sure there's a simple reason why. And the Pacman one isn't working in IE (I know, who cares).
How can your web page miss with this winner?
What do you mean when you were young?! I still do it this way, ..., oh wait, I actually use an xterm; nevermind.
1. Write a google gadget
2. ?
3. Profit !!!1111
After I submit my gadget, google thanked me by sending a free tshirt, so I guess that is the 2. step.
I'm sorry, but haven't we already seen this in several different incarnations before? Microsoft's "Active Desktop" in Win98. Konfabulator. Apple's Dashboard.
What is this obsession with "widgets", "applets", and "gadgets"? They inevitably end up doing the exact same boring things: weather, sports scores, stocks, dictionary, and maybe a little game. Great. The world of computing has changed forever.
These things are often bloated little programs because they have to run in JavaScript or some other awful language. They never have consistent UIs, so users can't learn many patterns from using one that they can apply to another. Also, it looks like Google doesn't retain any quality control over who can submit "gadgets", so I'm sure it's bound to be abused by people who want to make malware.
This is a prime example of a "me, too" project, and I fail to see how Google's done it any better than the predecessors. At least with Gmail and Google Maps they innovated those applications compared to what came before. And how does this make Google any money whatsoever? Will they put ads in the gadgets? Why should any stockholder be pleased that Google developers are wasting their time on "gadgets"?
Thumbs down, Google. I am not impressed.
Somehow the fact that Yahoo! has had Yahoo! Widgets for months, seems to shine down on the Google Gadgets. Recently, I did up a Spidermonkey+ZZiplib hack to get Y!'s widgets running on my linux box - it is not impossible for Konfabulator to work elsewhere either. But in general, I didn't expect Google to much of a follower into a market, but it seems that recently they've been doing that ?
Gmail was innovation ... *shrug*
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Yahoo News is reporting that slashdot users use Google News to get articles reported by Yahoo News on Google Gadget.
1) Google doesn't have any ideas.
2) They never did.
most of them weren't written by Google. Google was too busy redesigning PC power distribution to write them.
No thank you.
Isn't it unfortunate that all these Google Gadgets, Yahoo or Opera Widgets, and whatnot have to be coded in that so-boring javascript?
I wish I could replace the Yahoo widget engine by some new Perl widget engine, which would take care of displaying the stuff in the GUI from simple and elegant Perl code and XML. That would be cool.
(No, TK doesn't count. Nor does wxPerl. It needs to be much simpler)
I was going to say, claiming to have coded html when you were young isn't claiming much in the way of seniority, either.
:P
I code html in vt100 emulation, but I use emacs.
They even have PONIES!!!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
True, but the same is true when you purchase software (including the OEM software that came with the box itself), and also when you insert certain treacherous DRM-enabled audio discs into an insufficiently protected Windows box (e.g. Sony rootkit fiasco). So it's not really a question of how you obtain the code, but whether you trust the party providing it. In Google's case, at least they have an official stance of "don't be evil", which (as we've seen) is a lot better than some other sources. That, and they seem relatively competent in the overall scheme of things.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
I think that they are pretty cool. I wrote one to display my photographs: http://tinyurl.com/rlo63/
Interestingly enough, someone has already tried converting a Google Gadget to an Opera Widget.
The terminology is getting really odd, though... gadgets+widgets = gidgets?
Go-go-Gadget Google?
Google Gadgets has a Wikipedia search gadget and a dictionary gadget.
In Firefox I bookmarked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%25s , gave it keyword 'w', and just enter "{Ctrl-L}w anime" to jump to a Wikipedia article. The %s gets replaced by the rest of what you type in the location field.
Here are some more:
Merriam-Webster dictionary: http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=DictioIMDB search: http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%s
directions from your house (keyword "mapto"): http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1600+Pennsylvania+A
=S
From macintouch.com:
Mesa Dynamics released Amnesty Generator 0.5b, a utility that converts any Google web page gadget into a Mac OS X Dashboard widget. The software "automates the process of embedding [Google's] gadget code into locally hosted web pages that are implemented inside Dashboard widgets."
No kidding. Google News is just like Google Search - it shows a short summary / tease, and a link, and that's all. Yahoo actually has articles (syndicated) and an editorial staff. I'd think /.ers would know this ...
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.