Alan Lewis

Google Jumps the Shark

I have had google.com as my homepage since 1999 (before that my homepage was Yahoo). I've been looking for an excuse to change it for a while, and what I saw this morning was a perfect excuse. This monstrosity is what greeted me when I launched my browser:

Google has never before been cluttered, but this is most certainly cluttered. Of course the thing that is new is a big huge graphic promoting Firefox. I love Firefox, but I don't use Google to be blasted with big graphical ads. I can go elsewhere for that. I counted the pixels (well, not an exact count, but close enough -- I drew boxes around the different areas and calculated those pixels) of crap vs useful stuff, and the crap beat out the useful stuff about 67,000 pixels to 55,000. And this is counting the Google logo as useful, which I did because I think it adds to the page.

I could have minimized some of the crap by clicking the sign out link on the top, but then I would get signed out of GMail, which is annoying. I want a way to get my google.com page back, nice and clean. Until then, I'll use something else. I'll try live.com as my home page for a while and see how that goes.

Before you accuse me of being biased or unfair, I want to emphasize that I love Google and that I think they have a great product. But something has changed in the company that they would allow this much crap to go up on the home page.

Google Contributes Plugin to eBay Community Codebase

Google has open sourced the eBay Watcher plugin for Google Desktop and contributed it to the eBay Community Codebase, eBay's website where developers can collaborate on open source projects. The plugin was contributed under the Apache License, a commercial-friendly open source license. Google engineer Larry Gadea, who developed the plugin, is the owner of the Codebase project.

Now that the project is open sourced, I'm hopeful that other developers will contribute enhancements. One that I'd love to see is to extend the plugin to show not just the eBay watch list, but also the bidding, items one, and items lost lists as well. All of the code is in one javascript file, and it is easy to dig in and understand how it works. I reviewed early versions of the code, and I noticed lots of great stuff that would be helpful to other developers, including duration formatting, good key retrieval code, and a clever trick where by parsing the browser URL the plugin can tell when a new item has been added to the watch list so that it can automatically refresh. To build your own version of the plugin you'll need your own set of production developer keys, so sign up for the eBay Developers Program and then go through the certification process to get started.

New eBay Plugin for Google Desktop

As part of the release of the new 3.0 beta of Google Desktop, Google has released a beta of a new eBay plugin they developed called eBay Watcher. The plugin, or "panel" as they call it, allows you to keep track of items on your eBay watch list. I got involved in the project by providing feedback on early versions of the product and by helping to ensure that they got certified in time for launch.

The plugin is a great example of what can be done using eBay Web Services. All of the data is retrieved using the Unified XML API, using calls like GeteBayBuying. They also take advantage of the new capability that we offer to rate limit API calls by User ID.

I met the product manager for the project at the PDC back in September, where I pitched the idea of an eBay plugin for the Google Sidebar. A few months later when they approached us about the plugin I asked him if they had started this project because of my suggestion. He said that they had already had something like this in mind at the time, but it is still nice to see my evangelism efforts having some tangible effect.

Congrats to Google for putting together a great product. Hope we get a chance to work together on more great stuff in the future.

Best. Mashup. URL. Ever.

I hate to brag, but I did help Adam come up with what may be the best URL ever for his eBay Motors/Google Maps mashup:

www.dudewheresmyusedcar.com

Adam and I will be at Mashup Camp in a couple of weeks, along with 300 close friends. I've heard that  DudeWheresMyUsedCar will be shown there -- it could be a top contender for the top prize (a Sun server delivered in person by Jonathan Schwartz). If you are attending, I'll see you there!

Update: The site seems to be down right now. I've pinged Adam to find out whats going on.

Update 2: OK, the site is back up, and its ready for the Mashup Camp competition.