Ian Murdock’s Weblog

Since I’m on a Google kick these last few days, let me ask a question I’ve been kicking around in my head for a long time: When are we going to get an API for our Gmail contacts?

Like scads of other people, I use Gmail as my primary mail “client” these days, and that means I want things like email autocomplete to work, which means Gmail has to know about my contacts (or at least their email addresses).

Gmail actually has a really slick interface to contact management that I’d happily use as my main address book. Trouble is, it’s not synchronized with anything, most importantly my cell phone, where I also want that address book to be available. So, for now, I have to maintain two address books—one in Gmail (with just the email addresses), and one in my phone (with everything else). Invariably, it takes effort to keep them “synchronized”, and I’m not always successful at doing so.

I was hopeful that the new “APIs to integrate with existing infrastructure” introduced in Google Apps Premier would finally address this shortcoming—after all, integration with corporate directories would seem to be a feature high on the “must have” list for any enterprise looking at Google. Alas, the APIs appear to only deal with single sign on and account provisioning, and do not appear to do any sort of deeper directory integration.

With an API, Plaxo could presumably synchronize contacts between Gmail and phones (and Outlook etc.), or even better, someone could do over the air synchronization. There have certainly been a wave of interesting products doing similar things using the Google Calendar API. I’ve thought about doing a synchronizer with libgmail, by I’m not sure what would happen (e.g., would I somehow trip the “lockdown in sector 4” alarm, which given my reliance on Gmail, would be pretty darned disruptive).

Thoughts? Anyone else in a similar situation?

Another recent Google discovery: In Google Reader’s mobile interface, there’s now a link at the bottom of each page: “mark these items as read”. Previously, the mobile interface had been more or less unusable because there was no way to mark items read short of actually reading each and every one. Now, if only there were a mobile client a la Gmail for Mobile that would allow me to scroll through my feeds like I do in my browser, only with the Blackberry scroll wheel rather than the mouse scroll wheel, I’d be in information junkie nirvana.

Just stumbled across the button “Check guest and resource availability” when adding a new appointment in Google Calendar. Sure enough, when clicked, a nice little window pops up that allows you to find slots of free time in common across invitees. Not sure if this is available across all of Google Calendar or if this is a Google Apps Premium feature (I’ve had imurdock.com in GAFYD for a while now and upgraded over the weekend). One problem is immediately apparent though: It only appears to be checking the main calendar (I actually have several calendars—work, home, travel, etc.). This is a problem with the SMS interface too, which only appears to operate on the main calendar.

Phil Wainewright: “So here is a selection of news stories culled from the past few months that allow us to objectively evaluate what happens when users ‘have total control over things like privacy and security’… […] Would any of those laptop thefts made the headlines had the data been stored in Google Apps? No, of course not, because the data would have remained inaccessible on Google’s servers.”

Great points. A little closer to home, how many times have you taken a call from an anguished family member who has just lost their data but who hasn’t heeded your advice to back up said data periodically? While we’re at it, how many times have you not heeded your own advice on the same subject? Could the SaaS providers possibly do any worse than we’ve been doing here? Granted, there needs to be a culture change, one that needs to happen on both sides of the transaction, to make this work. But it will eventually happen, because it Just Makes Sense.

Steve Rubel: “Google is surely aware of the dependency it has on Wikipedia.”

Richard MacManus: “Instead of using the entire product suite of a Google or an MSN or a Yahoo, you [should be able to] use the particular apps you like most from not only big players - but small startups too.”

I agree wholeheartedly. I’m a big believer in the componentization of the web, as I’ve written about before. Without a way to write independent apps that integrate with each other regardless of where they’re hosted, the future starts to look more and more like the mainframe era (albeit with better graphics). The world needs only five computers (shaping up to be Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, Windows Live and Yahoo!). However, we need to ensure that these five computers operate more as computing utilities where a thousand flowers can bloom than as centralized monoliths where the only way to integrate is to be assimilated.

Phil Wainewright: “The idea, by the way, that users are going to keep their own private backup somewhere else, as Google’s PR rep suggested in an email to TechCrunch, is patently absurd. The whole point of storing email in the cloud, surely, is to avoid having to download hundreds of megabytes to your hard disk every night just in case the service falls over.”

Emre Sokullu is writing about a hypothetical “GoogleOS” again. As a long time OS guy, let me be the first to say that this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. For one thing, Google already has an “operating system”. It’s the web, and Google dominates the web, so why in the world would they give their main competitor such an obvious advantage by moving into its turf? Furthermore, Google no more needs an operating system in the traditional sense of the word than it needs an office suite in the traditional sense of the word. Releasing yet another Linux distribution isn’t disruptive—redefining what an operating system is is disruptive, and Google’s already doing that. Two predictions for 2007 that I’m fairly sure will hold up: 1. This won’t be the last of the GoogleOS speculation; and 2. there won’t be a GoogleOS.

It’s now possible to dynamically link web data into Google spreadsheets. For example, stock information can be pulled in via the simple formula GoogleFinance(ticker, attribute), where attribute can be any number of metrics from market capitalization to P/E ratio. Not much to choose from yet—at this point, there’s only GoogleFinance and GoogleLookup, which seems more novelty than useful, and I’d love to see more than just the obvious metrics available for GoogleFinance, things like cash per share, revenue growth over the past m years, number of insider purchases over the past n months, etc. However, it’s a great start, and it’s pretty easy to see where they’re going with this—after all, most spreadsheets are inherently linked to external data sources, though I’d wager a majority of them are “linked” via copy and paste. I look forward to the day when you can pull in all manner of structured information into a spreadsheet via similar formulas.

To me, this is the real value of “Office 2.0″. To compete, the office challengers have to go beyond just copying Microsoft Office on the web—success will come from exploiting the new platform, not cloning the old model. Pretty easy to see something like this grow into a platform all its own too. With a few more financial metrics, a slightly more powerful macro language, and the ability to connect to more arbitrary data sources (say, Google Base or the CSV files my bank makes available to me), I could track my finances on the web in a Google spreadsheet and give Quicken the boot (for what I want to do, Quicken is like driving a nail with a sledgehammer).

Update: Google spreadsheets has an API now too.

Me: “[T]here are some pretty significant problems with the new [del.icio.us] extension, the biggest in my view being that there’s no way to change the sort order of the bookmarks within your favorite tags.”

An update came across the wire over the holiday weekend, and it is now possible to sort bookmarks alphabetically within your favorite tags.