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Back in January, we announced the start of early registration for Google I/O (our annual developer conference), and our team was excited to publish our new website for this year’s event. Today, we’re excited to give you a quick update on what’s in store for this year’s Google I/O and a brief look at what we’ve announced in the past five weeks.

• 63 sessions to be led by the engineering teams behind all the products to be featured at I/O, including Android, Google Chrome, Google Web Toolkit and Google Wave. We’ll have over 80 sessions listed by May.
• 58 companies are listed on the Developer Sandbox page, and we expect over 150 companies to participate in the Sandbox at I/O.
• 99 speakers, including Google engineers and prominent web development experts from other companies.
• We introduced our very first I/O BootCamp, which sold out in just two days.

Of course, some things will stay under wraps until the event itself, but we’re excited to share some Google I/O planning details with you in advance.

We’ll be teaming up with Maker Faire again this year for our After Hours evening party. Google I/O attendees will get to preview some of the amazing DIY projects that will be showcased at Maker Faire in San Mateo just a couple of days after I/O, and discounted Maker Faire tickets will be available during After Hours. We’ve also invited the organizers of Gadgetoff. They’ll be bringing along exciting, interactive gadgets, robots and vehicles.

Whether you’re already developing apps using products like App Engine, or wondering how to get started on your first Android app, we hope to see you at Google I/O in May. To learn more and to sign up, visit code.google.com/io.

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Developer Team

Excerpted from:
What to expect at Google I/O 2010

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I’m excited to announce that registration for Google I/O is now open at code.google.com/io. Our third annual developer conference will return to Moscone West in San Francisco on May 19-20, 2010. We expect thousands of web, mobile and enterprise developers to be in attendance.

I/O 2010 will be focused on building the next generation of applications in the cloud and will feature the latest on Google products and technologies like Android, Google Chrome, App Engine, Google Web Toolkit, Google APIs and more. Members of our engineering teams and other web development experts will lead more than 80 technical sessions. We’ll also bring back the Developer Sandbox, which we introduced at I/O 2009, where developers from more than 100 companies will be on hand to demo their apps, answer questions and exchange ideas.

We’ll be regularly adding more sessions, speakers and companies on the event website, and today we’re happy to give you a preview of what’s to come. Over half of all sessions are already listed, covering a range of products and technologies, as well as speaker bios. We’ve also included a short list of companies that will be participating in the Developer Sandbox. For the latest I/O updates, follow us (@googleio) on Twitter.

Today’s registration opens with an early bird rate of $400, which applies through April 16 ($500 after April 16). Faculty and students can register at the discounted Academia rate of $100 (this discounted rate is limited and available on a first come, first serve basis).

Last year’s I/O sold out before the start of the conference, so we encourage you to sign up in advance.

Google I/O
May 19-20, 2010
Moscone West, San Francisco

To learn more and sign up, visit code.google.com/io.

We hope to see you in May!

Originally posted here:
Google I/O 2010: Now open for registration

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Do you ever wonder what’s going on inside the browser when a webpage doesn’t load or respond as quickly as it should? Many developers do, especially when trying to build powerful web applications for their users.

But up until now, it’s been difficult for developers to identify problems in a slow-to-respond application. So, tonight at Google Campfire One, we’re happy to announce that we’re adding a new tool to Google Web Toolkit called Speed Tracer.

Speed Tracer is a Google Chrome extension that enables developers to identify performance problems in their web apps using a “Sluggishness Graph,” in combination with many other metrics. In the spirit of clean, simple design, developers need only look at the Y-Axis of their application’s Sluggishness Graph to see how they’re doing:

• If the y-axis is close to zero, then the app is fast
• If the y-axis registers around 100%, then the app is, well, sluggish

And in either case, Speed Tracer provides lots of additional data to help diagnose any particular performance issue.

We think developers will find that Speed Tracer looks under the covers of web applications like never before. In fact, we even used Speed Tracer to optimize the performance of Speed Tracer itself! (It’s really an HTML application after all, built with Google Web Toolkit, and deployed as a Google Chrome extension.) If you’re a web developer, download and install Speed Tracer on the Google Chrome Developer Channel.

This is one of many other improvements in GWT 2.0 — which we released at this evening’s Campfire — that make building web applications fast, and the applications you build run even faster. Check out the Google Code Blog for more information and to watch our Campfire One developer announcement.

Posted by Bruce Johnson, Engineering Director

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Faster apps for a faster web: introducing Speed Tracer

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Last week, we hosted the the final round of Google Code Jam 2009, the sixth iteration of our annual global programming competition. From almost 23,000 registrants in the beginning, we winnowed down the contestants to the fastest and most fervent coders. On Friday, we brought the top 23 competitors to our Mountain View headquarters for four concentrated hours of thinking, testing and trouble-shooting. The competition platform, built as a 20% project by a group of Google engineers, was powered by Google App Engine and allowed the contestants to use the programming language of their choice. These diverse finalists represented 15 different countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas.

The contestants were confronted by six puzzles. In one, they had to take on the role of a telecommunications company upgrading some of its equipment. The company wants to upgrade its most profitable cell towers; however, doing so might force them to upgrade less profitable towers as well — at a high cost. The contestants were charged with figuring out which towers to upgrade, to maximize gains and minimize costs. The competitors used their coding skills to figure out the most efficient solution as quickly as possible.

Last year’s champion, Tiancheng Lou of China, code-named ACRush, once again took top honors and the $5,000 grand prize. Qi Zichao of China won second place, and Iwata Yoichi of Japan came in third.

For a glimpse into this year’s Code Jam take look at the video below, courtesy of NBC. And to all the coders out there, we hope to see you next year — start practicing now!

Posted by Bartholomew Furrow, 20% Tech Lead for Google Code Jam

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And the Google Code Jam 2009 champion is…

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Save the date: Google I/O 2010

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At Google, we’ve been working closely with the folks at Adobe for years. Some of our most exciting projects such as YouTube, Android, Google Site Search, Google Chrome and even Google web search require close integration with Adobe’s technologies. Our engineering teams regularly exchange ideas, tips and bugs as we build upon each others’ efforts.

Along these lines, we’re excited to be joining Adobe’s Open Screen Project, an initiative established a year and a half ago to help developers more easily design content for the web across multiple screens using the Flash Platform. We’ve always believed that open platforms lead to greater innovation on the web and we see participating in the Open Screen Project as another step in that direction. We’re excited to continue working with the teams at Adobe on pushing the web forward and to see where the next generation of web development will take us.

Posted by Bill Coughran, Senior Vice President of Engineering

See more here:
Teaming up with Adobe and the Open Screen Project

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Starting Wednesday, September 30 we’ll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select customers of Google Apps

We’ll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.

Some of you have asked what we mean by preview. This just means that Google Wave isn’t quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we’ve focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky.

There are also still key features of Google Wave that we have yet to fully implement. For example, you can’t yet remove a participant from a wave or define groups of users, draft mode is still missing and you can’t configure the permissions of users on a wave. We’ll be rolling out these and other features as soon as they are ready — over the next few months.

Despite all this, we believe you will find that Google Wave has the potential for making you more productive when communicating and collaborating. Even when you’re just having fun! We use it ourselves everyday for everything from planning pub crawls to sharing photos, managing release processes and debating features to writing design documents. In fact, we collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.

Speaking of ways you could potentially use Google Wave, we’re intrigued by the many detailed ones people have taken the time to describe. To mention just a few: journalist Andy Ihnatko on producing his Chicago Sun-Times column, filmmaker Jonathan Poritsky on streamlining the movie-making process, scientist Cameron Neylon on academic papers and lab work, Alexander Dreiling and his SAP research team on collaborative business process modelling, and ZDNet’s Dion Hincliffe on a host of enterprise use cases.

The Wave team’s most fun day since May? We invited a group of students to come spend a day with us at Google’s Sydney office. Among other things, we asked them to collaboratively write stories in Google Wave about an imaginary trip around the world. They had a ball! As did we… 

Finally, a big shoutout to the thousands of developers who have patiently taken part in our ongoing developer preview. It has been great fun to see the cool extensions already built or being planned and incredibly instructive to get their help planning the future of our APIs. To get a taste for what some of these creative developers have been working on, and to learn more about the ways we hope to make it even easier for developers to build new extensions, check out this post on our developer blog.

Happy waving!

Posted by Lars Rasmussen, Engineering Manager & Stephanie Hannon, Group Product Manager

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Surf’s up Wednesday: Google Wave update

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We launched iGoogle in 2005 as a way for people to quickly and easily personalize their Google experience with all the information on the web that was most useful to them. Now tens of millions of people choose to use their iGoogle homepage to check email, track the news, watch videos, chat with friends and much more. Today, we’re pleased to tell you about the new social features that we’re introducing to iGoogle.

First, we’re excited to introduce social gadgets for iGoogle. Social gadgets let you share, collaborate and play games with your friends on top of all the things you can already do on your homepage. The 19 social gadgets we’re debuting today offer many new ways to make your homepage more useful and fun. If you’re a gaming fanatic, compete with others in Who has the biggest brain? or challenge your fellow Chess or Scrabble enthusiasts to a quick match. Stay tuned in to the latest buzz with media-sharing gadgets from NPR, The Huffington Post, and YouTube. To manage your day-to-day more efficiently, check things off alongside your friends with the social To-Do list gadget.

Your friends are able to see what you share or do in your social gadgets either by having the same gadgets on their homepages, or through a new feed called Updates. Updates can include your recently shared photo albums, your favorite comics strips, your travel plans for the weekend and more. To help you manage who you are sharing with, we’ve created a Friends group. You can add and edit friends in this group at any time. If you already have a Friends group within your Google Contacts, you’ll be able to easily share with those friends on iGoogle as well. If you don’t care to share, iGoogle’s social features are optional and can be disabled on a gadget-to-gadget basis with just a few clicks.

It’s developers who have really made iGoogle into the rich experience it is — growing our gadget directory to over 60,000 gadgets today — and we know iGoogle developers will help us quickly expand our collection of social gadgets. You can get information about how to build social gadgets for iGoogle on our developer site: code.google.com/igoogle.

We introduced these new social features recently to Australia users and are gradually rolling them out to users in the U.S. over the next week. Don’t fret if you don’t see your iGoogle page updated yet — just check back soon. The Google homepage has always been a place that connects people to information, and we’re excited to now also be a place that connects people to each other. We hope these social gadgets make iGoogle an even more fun and personal homepage for you. You can learn more by checking out the video below.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience and Rose Yao, iGoogle Product Manager

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I scream, you scream, we all scream for iGoogle social!

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Are you energized by cracking conundrums? Are you keen to crank out some code? Here at Google, we know the rush of encountering a challenge and rising to meet it, transforming a problem into a solution and a solution into code. Since 2003, we’ve been sharing that experience with a global community of computer scientists through our annual programming competition, Google Code Jam.

Today, we’re excited to announce Google Code Jam 2009, powered by Google App Engine. This year, contestants will compete in several 2½-hour online rounds, attacking three to four difficult algorithmic problems during each round. To code up solutions to the problems, they’ll use the programming language and tools of their choice; when those solutions are ready, they’ll try them against our fiendish test data. One wrong answer out of a hundred, and it’s back to the drawing board!

Registration opens today. So visit the Google Code Jam site to register, read the rules and — most importantly — begin to practice by trying out the problems from last year’s contest, so you’ll be in shape when the qualification round starts on September 2. After four tough rounds of online competition, the top 25 competitors will be flown to our Mountain View headquarters to to match wits for the $5,000 first prize — and the title of Code Jam champion.

On your mark, get set… CODE!

Posted by Bartholomew Furrow, 20% Tech Lead for Google Code Jam

The rest is here:
Google Code Jam returns

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Google I/O has come and gone, and we’ve been working to get all of the content online so those of you who couldn’t be there could experience some of the excitement. At the conference, we shared our thoughts on the future of the web along with some exciting announcements including a developer preview of Google Wave, our new collaboration and communication tool, and Google Web Elements, which makes adding a bit of Google to your website or blog as simple as copy and paste. In addition, I/O featured 80+ sessions of technical insight, and over 140 companies joined our developer sandbox at the conference to showcase the web applications they’ve been building using Google developer products. 

Source:
Experience our largest developer gathering online

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Back in early 2004, Google took an interest in a tiny mapping startup called Where 2 Tech, founded by my brother Jens and me. We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps.

As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the ’60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point, and I was immediately sold. (Jens insists it took him hours to convince me, but I like my version better.)

We had a blast the next couple years turning Where 2’s prototype mapping site into Google Maps. But finally we decided it was time to leave the Maps team and turn Jens’ new idea into a project, which we codenamed “Walkabout.” We started with a set of tough questions:

• Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
• Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
• What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms? 

After months holed up in a conference room in the Sydney office, our five-person “startup” team emerged with a prototype. And now, after more than two years of expanding our ideas, our team, and technology, we’re very eager to return and see what the world might think. Today we’re giving developers an early preview of Google Wave.

A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

As with Android, Google Chrome, and many other Google efforts, we plan to make the code open source as a way to encourage the developer community to get involved. Google Wave is very open and extensible, and we’re inviting developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch. Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:

• The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It’s an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave). 
• Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
• The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave. 

So, this leaves one big question we need your help answering: What else can we do with this?

If you’re a developer and you’d like to roll up your sleeves and start working on Google Wave with us, you can read more on the Google Wave Developer blog about the Google Wave APIs, and check out the Google Code blog to learn more about the Google Wave Federation Protocol. 

If you’d like to be notified when we launch Google Wave as a public product, you can sign up at http://wave.google.com/. We don’t have a specific timeframe for public release, but we’re planning to continue working on Google Wave for a number of months more as a developer preview. We’re excited to see what feedback we get from our early tinkerers, and we’ll undoubtedly make lots of changes to the Google Wave product, platform, and protocol as we go.

We look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Posted by Lars Rasmussen, Software Engineering Manager

More:
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

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Today is the first day of Google I/O — two days of developer talks, fireside chats and demos, all focused on the latest innovations in the web as a development platform. We’re excited to have this chance to welcome more than 3,000 developers to the Moscone Center in (unusually) sunny San Francisco for a variety of interactive roundtables and talks on subjects like Android, Google Maps and Google Apps for the Enterprise.

We’ll be back with more news as the conference progresses. In the meantime, you can follow updates on the @googleio Twitter stream; videos of all sessions will be available on code.google.com shortly after they conclude.

Posted by Emily Wood, Google Blog team

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Kicking off 2nd annual Google I/O developer gathering

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When we started building Friend Connect, we wanted to provide a fully open system — one that lets you join any website and interact with the people there in a meaningful way, regardless of where they come from. To enable this kind of engagement, we used open standards like OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial as underlying technologies, enabling any other service to plug into Friend Connect.

Today, we’re excited to share that Netlog has used these open standards to integrate their social networking service with Google Friend Connect. Now, Netlog’s more than 45 million users across Europe can:

• Sign into any of the millions of sites and blogs using Friend Connect with their Netlog credentials
• Use their Netlog profiles on these sites
• See if any of their friends are already members of the same sites and invite other Netlog friends to join
• Share their Friend Connect activities with their friends on Netlog, and
• Send messages back to their Netlog friends

Additionally, for sites that are already using Friend Connect, one of the benefits of this standards based model is that they can take advantage of any new service that chooses to join this open ecosystem, like Netlog, without any additional work. The new network option simply appears.

Any social network or service, whether they are large or small, regional or global, niche or general audience, is welcome to take advantage of these open standards to integrate with Friend Connect, and participate in an open social web.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager

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Netlog integrates with Google Friend Connect

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Site owners often tell us that to build strong communities on the web, they have to be a jack-of-all-trades. With Google Friend Connect, we want to empower any website to awaken their community, even if the site owner doesn’t have the technical background or the time to build social features from scratch.

Today we’re launching an enhanced comments gadget. With this gadget, visitors from all over the world can leave messages in their native tongue, and other viewers will be able to instantly translate these comments into the language of their choice. For websites like Earth Hour, where people from many countries are working together to conserve energy, this comments gadget offers users a new way to engage in more meaningful discussions, regardless of what language they speak. Watch the video below to learn more:

The comments gadget is just one way Friend Connect can help webmasters foster deeper interactions between site members. You may have seen that over the past few weeks we have added several new gadgets to the Friend Connect gallery, all with the goal of helping people interact with one another on the sites they enjoy. These gadgets include the event gadget for promoting an upcoming event and letting members indicate if they’re attending, as well as two gadgets built by OpenSocial developers: the Polls gadget, which gives opinion polls a social twist, and the Get Answers gadget, which lets members ask questions to the community and answer questions posted by others.

To learn more about these gadgets, or to keep your eye out for future gadgets we will be rolling out for Friend Connect, please visit the Social Web Blog.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager, Google Friend Connect

Excerpted from:
Strengthening a worldwide community with Google Friend Connect

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Scarcity brings clarity, and many companies are taking important steps to adjust to today’s economic climate. At Google, we’ve started changing the way we build and release products.

In the past six months alone we’ve launched nearly 50 projects and small products on Google App Engine — from Google Moderator and Labs for Google Apps to internal-facing tools for both our Ads and Web teams. In all cases we found it quicker, easier, and more cost-effective to leave the infrastructure to App Engine, and the actual product-building to our engineering teams.

Running our internal and external apps on App Engine isn’t without difficulty, however, and we’ve learned a lot in the process. Tonight at Campfire One we released a new set of features — based on community and internal feedback — that helps App Engine interface more easily with businesses’ existing technologies:

• App Engine’s early look at Java™ language support includes a Java runtime, integration with the new Google Web Toolkit 1.6, and a Google Plugin for Eclipse
• The Google Secure Data Connector enables centrally-managed access to on-premise data from Google Apps
• The database import tool makes it easier to move gigabytes of data into App Engine (and export functionality is coming within the month)
• Cron support can execute scheduled tasks like report generation and DB clean-up at regular intervals

By reducing the administrative headaches that come with scaling and distributing an application, we hope that App Engine will continue to let developers do what they do best: launch services that delight users.

Take a look at videos from tonight’s Campfire One below:

To learn more about Google App Engine or today’s announcements, feel free to check out the Google Code Blog or online docs. You can also register for our annual developer conference, Google I/O, as the App Engine team will be there to answer any questions you might have, as well as unveil a few surprises.

Java is a trademark or registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

Update at 10:44 pm PDT: We’ve just added the videos from tonight’s Campfire One.

Posted by Kevin Gibbs, Tech Lead, Google App Engine

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New features and an early look at Java for App Engine

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