The Official Google Blog says Google wants to help developers who want to spend more time developing Gadgets and:

Our hope with Google Gadget Ventures is to help create an ecosystem where developers can spend more time doing what they love—building great Gadgets.

It’s very nice of Google to think about us pour developers, but I don’t think this is the main reason.

Google knows how important the developer community is. Without developers who want to create Gadgets, iGoogle won’t be very popular and people will go to Yahoo, Netvibes or one of the other personalized pages services. I even think there are more Netvibes modules at the moment than there are Google Gadgets. So it’s a very smart move to start awarding developers.

Two different types of funding

Google Gadget Ventures is a pilot project which offers 2 types of funding:

1. a grant of $5000 for developers who’ve built a gadget that gets at least 250,000 page views per week. You only have to submit a one page proposal how you want to improve the gadget and how you’re gonna use the $5000 to reach that goal.
2. a seed investment of $100,000 for developers who want to create a business around the Google Gadget platform. You can only apply for this type of funding if you already got the $5000 grant. You also have to submit a business plan about how you plan to build a viable business around the platform.

Other developers?

It’s interesting to see how this is going to evolve. There are many more developers building on top of Google APIs. Will Google start rewarding these also in the future?

Google Maps developers can always use the Google Adsense platform to monetize their Mashups. Some of these days you can even use Adsense ads on your maps.

As a sidenote, there’s also a new product called Lat49 that is supposed to help Maps Mashup developers to make money with their maps by displaying ads within or outside the map. The product isn’t available yet, but according to the Programmableweb blog, they are looking for publishers and advertisers to take part in their current aplha testing.

But what about the things where you can’t use Ads? E.g. Sketchup models of buildings which can be used inside Google Earth, Google Earth mashups or Mapplets? It would be interesting to see if Google starts a funding project for these as well.

In the mean time, I’m gonna think about creating my own Google Gadget. I don’t know what kind of Gadget yet, so any suggestions are welcome

These are very interesting times for us developers, it’s like Read/WriteWeb wrote:

Conclusion – it’s Christmas for third party developers

It started with the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference, where Google announced the Google Street View and Mapplets.

The day after Where 2.0, Google had organized a Developer day in 10 cities around the world, where a lot of developer related stuff was launched.

In this post I’m highlighting some of the new stuff I find interesting, like new Google Maps API features, Mapplets and the Mashup Editor.

Where 2.0

There was a lot of interesting stuff going on at the Where 2.0 conference, but I think the Google Street View got the most press coverage.

Does somebody know if there’s a European equivalent to the Where 2.0 conference, because the US is a little bit too far for me just to attend a conference.

I asked Gina Blaber, O’Reilly’s Conference Director, if O’Reilly is ever going to organize such an event in Europe, just like they organized the euroOSCON conference last 2 years and the upcoming RailsConf in Berlin. She said they would love to organize a euroWhere 2.0, but if it’ll ever happen she couldn’t tell. Maybe we Europeans just have to organize it ourselves

Google Developer Day

The day after the Where 2.0 conference, Google organized a Developer Day in 10 different countries. Sadly not in the Netherlands, because they already organized one last March in Amsterdam. But the Amsterdam day wasn’t as technical and as interesting as these events. Maybe next time.

Mapplets

I think Mapplets are the most important new feature Google announced recently. Street View got the most attention, but I think mapplets will be a lot more useful than Street View.

The most important difference between Google Maps and Google Earth were the layers in Google Earth. Users can decide which layers they turn on or of. On maps.google.com you get to see everything or just the kml overlay you were viewing. With Mapplets you can create layers for maps.google.com.

This way users can combine different layers to search for information. For example, you are looking for a new house, with schools and public transport in the neighborhood. You enable the housing mapplet, the school mapplet and the public transport mapplet. You get all the information you need on one map.

A similar example can be seen in the demo from Google:

I haven’t had time to dive into the documentation and try to create my own mapplets, but I’m going to do so and when I do, I’ll write another episode in my series about How to get information into Google Maps, because this is a great new way to add your information into Google Maps.

Mashup editor

The Mashup editor is a new tool created by Google. At this moment it’s a limited test and you have to sign up and wait to get access.

I already got access and played a little bit with the editor. It looks a lot more developer oriented than Yahoo Pipes. You get a text editor where you can use Google Tags to create your mashup. It also uses a subset of XPath. It is very easy to create a map from a GeoRSS feed, or a mashup of a GData feed.

I found a few limitations, eg. you can only create filters on GData feeds. But there’s Yahoo Pipes! You can use Pipes to filter your RSS feeds and create a new feed and use the Mashup editor to create a nice mashup with this feed. Pipes an the Mashup editor are complementary.

I will write a thorough review of the Editor, but until then, you can take a tour of the editor or see a few examples created with the Mashup editor.

Google Maps API changes

There have been a lot of API changes lately, but the biggest new API feature is the addition of the directions API . In a lot of countries (currently Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States) you can use this API to get driving directions.

Another new feature is the possibility to add traffic overlays on top of your map. This feature is only available in the US.

The Open Source Utility Library also got an interesting new extenstion, the DragZoomControl. You can use this in your map to give the users the ability to drag a rectangle on the map to zoom in to the bounds of that rectangle.

Google Maps and Adsense

Google also announced they are going to give developers of Google Maps the ability to monetize their Maps by adding Adsense ads to Maps. They didn’t specify a date when this will be launched, but I heard something about late June.

I’m also not sure whether this will only be made available on Mapplets, or also on Maps created on your own webpages. I’ll try to get more information, and write a separate article about this.

update: Pamela from Google confirmed AdSense will be made available through the Google Maps API, so every Google Maps developer can use it. You can also see Brandon Badger announce the AdSense Maps API (the announcement starts around 30 minutes in the video).

And more…..

Other new things that were launched are:

• Google Gears, an Open Source library to create off line web applications. Very nice, I wonder how this fits in the Firefox 3 off line mechanism. I think it’s great Google released the library as Open Source. There are already non-Google Webapps who started using it.
• Street View, high quality street images on maps.google.com. At this moment only available in a few major cities in the US. I wonder whether Google can make this available for all major cities around the world. The first discussions about privacy issues are already showing up, but also the first blogs who are indexing the most interesting, funny, strange Street Views.
• New Youtube APIs, these aren’t released yet, but there was an announcement that new APIs will be made available shortly. These new APIs will be GData based. You can watch the video of the presentation for more about the present and the new APIs.

Summary

How many announcements can a company make in such a short period and how can a developer cope with all these new exiting things that can be used?

The future will tell how successful all the new Google features and tools will be. Next few weeks I’ll experiment with some of the new features and decide which onces I’m gonna use, so stay tuned for more information and in the mean time you can watch most of the presentations of the Google Developers Day in the Google Developer Day Channel at Youtube.

The Google Maps API Team is excited to announce our new open source project, the GMaps Utility Library. This project will be hosted on code.google.com and will let the Google engineers for the Maps API work hand-in-hand with the many great developers in the Maps API community. Together, we can extend the core Maps API and ensure that every developer need is met.

There are a few reasons why I think this is great news:

1. The first good thing about this is that Google takes the development community around the Google Maps API seriously. They want to work together with the community to create a better API.
2. It allows developers to create and share extensions to the Maps API more easily.
3. The Google Maps API can be extended without the core becoming bloated. The user of the API can choose which extensions they want to use, so they are in control!

I’m very curious which parts of the API will become Open Source. It won’t be the core I reckon because the project is called the “GMaps Utility Library”.

At this moment they’ve open-sourced the code for the GMarkerManager. The code, docs and examples can be found at: http://gmaps-utility-library-dev.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/markermanager/

Another thing I’m wondering about is how they are going to work with the community? Will it be the community who decides what will be in the Core API? I guess will have to wait and see.

If you want to participate in the project, you’ll have to read the FAQ

At this moment I’m just using the API, but maybe I’ll find some time to dive into the code myself.

There are two types of Plus Box result: Stock information and maps. I don’t find stock information that interesting, but I love the maps Plus Box. If you search for a business and Google knows its address, there will be a map shown next to the search result with a marker where the address is.

At this moment most (all?) of the results are from the US. You can search for restaurants in New York and you’ll see a few examples (at the bottom of the first page). Sadly I haven’t found any business with a Map Plus Box in The Netherlands (or elsewhere in Europe). The only result with a maps Plus Box you’ll get when searching for restaurants in Amsterdam is Amsterdam Restaurant in New York

The Google Blog says they are working hard to increase the availability and I hope they will add availability of non-US businesses soon.

I’m not sure a lot of people now how they can add their business information to Google so it’ll show up in the Plus Box or in a Google Maps search. You can add your own information by using the Local Business Center. See more information at the Webmaster Help Center.

In The Netherlands most companies are registered in the Chamber of Commerce register (KvK) and this information automatically shows up in a Google Maps search. At the Local Business Center you can change and add your information (images, description, categories, etc). Before these changes will show up in the search results you have to enter a PIN you’ll get by snail mail sent to your business address.

In the Local Business Center you can also see some kind of statistics, I don’t know what kind of stats it’ll show, because I haven’t received the PIN yet. I’ve changed my information on March 8.

According to the Google Blog there will be more Plus Boxes in the future. One has already been spotted, the Video Plus Box, which shows a video in the Plus Box. I’m curious whether this will only show Youtube and Google Video results, or also videos of Google’s competitors?

This page lists feature requests for the Google Maps API. If you like a feature and it’s already listed, you can write your name next to it to. If it’s not listed you can append it to the list.

There are a few very interesting feature requests.

‘Compatibility with other map APIs’. This is the feature request the article at the Geonames weblog talks about. Indeed it would be very nice if there’s a common API which is shared between all the Map vendors. There can be different reasons why you want to switch between different maps, eg the license changes, the area your application is about is covered better in a different map, etc. One problem I can think of with this approach is the that the feature set is not the same for every Map. So this common API can only cover the basics, but maybe that’s enough?

If you want a common API right away you have to take a look at projects like myMap, or Mapstraction. These projects are adding an extra layer on top of the major Map APIs from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. You could also use the Open Layers API which also supports the APIs of these vendors.

Another nice feature request is ‘Ability to restrict geocoder to a particular region, country’. If this would be possible and your application is about a specific region you even could create an auto completion search on addresses.

If you’re using the Google Maps API a lot, take a look at the list and add your name or feature request to it.

After the call I realized I didn’t ask for the precise date, so I guess I have to wait for the invitation. I can’t find any information about this developers day on the web.

The lady said she got my phone number from this website. Probably the Stemlocaties Amsterdam page (Google Maps mashup with all vote locations for the Dutch General Elections) got their attention somehow

update 1: Today (March 1) I got the invitation, so now I know the date . The program looks very interesting, so Google count me in!

update 2: Read my report about the GeoDay