Monday, July 23, 2007

Where the Google OS Is Open

Yesterday, I listed a couple of places within the Google OS/ office suite where the system prefers its own products. Today I want to contrast this to places where Google opens up parts of the system to allow you to connect third-party tools rather easily (most of these make good business sense, too, because open systems contain less risks for users to switch to, thus lowering the entry barrier):

• iGoogle: With the iGoogle platform you can create your own widgets – including a third-party search engine – to allow people to add it to the Google homepage.
• Google Video: Google Video went from displaying only videos you uploaded to Google, to now displaying videos from different third-party video services (including, but not limited to, its own services).
• SketchUp: SketchUp is a 3D software previously acquired by Google, and it allows you to import and export from/ to several 3D formats (like AutoCAD, Collada, FBX, 3DS, or VRML).
• Google Maps: Google has a feature called MyMaps which incorporates user-created overlays, as well as so-called Mapplets, which can add third-party functionality on top of Google Maps.
• Gmail: Google’s web-based email client allows you to switch your reply-to address to something external. I have it set to info@blogoscoped.com, for instance, so it might be easier for me to switch to another email program one of these days (e.g. I tried switching to the new Yahoo Mail for a while but it’s much less productive for me, so I went back to Gmail, and that’s exactly the kind of user freedom producing overall better apps in the end).
  Additionally, Gmail is POP3-enabled, meaning you can install a third-party email client to download Gmail emails. Many other email clients from competing web apps makers don’t have this feature.
• Google Co-op: You can add your own information to Google search results by letting users subscribe to your “Co-op” result. This will end up displaying a box on top of search results with specific extra functionality.
• Google AJAX Search API: Google opens up their search technology through a variety of (mostly client-side) tools, like the AJAX Search API. This means you can run a Google search on your own website or blog (e.g. I’m using the AJAX Search API for this blog).
• Google Code Project Hosting: You can host any application with Google’s project hosting service, as long as it’s an open source app.
• Google Blog Search: Google’s search engine specialized on blogs (or anything carrying a feed, actually) allows you to export results to a feed for further syndication (you can choose between either Atom or RSS).
• Blogger: Back when I started this blog with Google’s Blogger (the Pro account, at the time), I was able to FTP-export all posts to my own domain. Not using a Google-owned domain for all permalinks gave me the freedom to rather easily switch away from Blogger at the point where I was dissatisfied with their service, which happened in early 2005 (and later on, I was able to parse this static export into my own database to run with this blog’s blogging software).
• Google News: Every news source has a chance to be considered for inclusion with Google’s News crawler, and you don’t need to pay Google for “extra-fast consideration” or anything the like (the Yahoo directory, in comparison, does accept your money for extra-quick consideration).
• Google Analytics: Google’s free analytics software, formerly the paid third-party tool called Urchin, lets you export your data in PDF, XML, CSV format (CSV, the Comma-Separated Values format, can be used for Excel).
• Google Gears: Google’s platform for allowing web sites to provide offline capabilities is open source, so anyone can use it for their purposes. (Google, by making Gears a cross-industry effort, may want to increase the chances Gears comes pre-installed on user’s computers over time; people by and large hardly install plug-ins just for a single site, even when it’s Google, and this particular plug-in Google needs as extra weapon in the battle against Microsoft Office.)
• Google Finance Onebox: Google at this time still points to competing finance info providers when you enter a ticker symbol into Google Web search. Among these providers are Yahoo Finance, MSN Money, MarketWatch and more.
• Google Calendar: Google’s calendar web app can import from the iCal or CSV formats (like Microsoft Outlook).
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets: Google’s online word processing and spreadsheets app offer you to export files into different formats, including HTML, RTF, Word, OpenOffice and PDF (in Google Docs) or CSV, HTML, ODS, PDF, and XLS (in Google Spreadsheets).

Where the Google OS Is Op ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (4)

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