On Tuesday of this week I attended Google's London Developer Day, held at Wembley Stadium. The keynote hosted in The Bobby Moore Room (renamed 'Space Invaders' for the day) opened proceedings introducing the wide range of Google developer products - including Google Gears, Google Web Toolkit and Android ("the first complete, open and free mobile platform from the Open Handset Alliance").
Being a designer myself, I wanted to find out the various things that Google are making possible in the online world, as opposed to directly learning how to implement these things. So I chose to avoid the various code labs that were running through the day!
The first talk I went to was entitled "The state of AJAX" by Dion Almaer. As well as being a very well delivered speech it was particularly exciting to see how much is now possible with AJAX from the various online open source libraries. He'd even devloped a Wii games using purely JavaScript!
I then went to a talk called "Build YOUR YouTube" - which, whilst being a bit too 'techie' for my liking (!) - showed how you can very easily build a user generated video website based on the YouTube engine, which is completely customised to your brand.
The final 2 talks I went to were about Google's OpenSocial products - which allows developers to build applications which will work across all social networking sites which have signed up. The biggest name to already sign up is MySpace, and representatives from Hyves, Netlog and Viadeo were present to discuss how they were implementing it. The second of the 2 talks was particularly well delivered by Chewy Trewhella.
It was particularly interesting to see how much effort Google is putting in to working with the open source community, and how all of these different tools can be applied to Playgroup's future online work.
Here is a video of the day:
