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Sunday, June 14, 2009

Google Calendar Gadgets Appearing

Andrew Pariser emails in a surprise finding in Google Calendar (if by any chance you’re able to reproduce this – I’m not – please comment):

Opened up gcal today, to find an interesting new “Gadgets” link under the google logo. Clicking it opens a right side pane that introduces a gadgets menu and a selection of gadgets to choose from:

  • Add Tasks
  • Add Googler Search
  • Add Jump to Date
  • Add Next Meetings
  • Add Time Zones
  • Add Where Are My Friends?

I also have a nice “INTERNAL ONLY” tag at the top of this menu, even though I’m not and have never been a google employee. (...)

Most of the gadgets (tasks, jump to date, time zone) are pretty obvious. Next meetings shows the next event scheduled in your calendar. Googler search presumably allows me to search the employee database, although I think it’s disabled for me. Where are my friends allows you to add friends and it displays their availability information as decided by their google calendar (provided they keep this information publicly viewable).

[Thanks Andrew and Tony!]

Update: As noted in the comments, you can try disable all CSS on the page (e.g. in Firefox, hit View → Page Style → No Style), then click “Gadgets” to the right, and scroll to the bottom of the page. Now you may see the text “INTERNAL ONLY”. Clicking in these parts of the page will lead to (supposedly internal but accessible) feedback forms, or (inaccessible from the outside) Google intranet pages.

The source of the Google employee search widget, “Googler Search” (facewall.xml), is also available, albeit it probably only runs from within Google. For instance, thumbnails for the search are stored at https://moma-api.corp.google.com/[prefix]/thumb (where prefix is an employees name as appearing in their email). The server search returns a JSON profile of an employee, and the codename “Woodstock” appears (perhaps denoting the Google intranet info API, I’m not sure).

[Thanks WebSonic!]

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