Google: gadgets & mashups
as of yesterday, more than 1.200 Google Gadgets formerly restricted to Google Desktop are now free for use on any website you want. the widget-collection includes modules for streaming-video, inline-chat, flickr- or iTunes-integration as well as loads of - more-or-less useless - eyecandy.
more interesting: Google launched an unbranded search-frontend at searchmash.com earlier this week. looks like searchmash is going to be a test-bed for search user-interfaces. currently searchmash integrates image-results with common results and allows ‘infinite’ scrolling through results (while Microsoft Live does this by automatically loading further results when the user scrolls to the bottom of the page, searchmash requires the user still to click the link “more web pages”, which kind of renders the feature useless for me).
[...] looks like Google ain’t going to slow down these days: Code Search - Google’s effort on indexing source-code on the web - was launched earlier today. Code Search offers developers powerful ways (read: regular expressions) to search for code-snippets in any particular language, under any specific license. a quick test-drive unveiled that Code Search suffers from similar problems like established competitors Krugle and Koders: string-based search-results often mistake underlying semantics. when searching for an id3-implementation in PHP, results often lead to external function-calls, but not the actual source implementing id3. still, indexing source-code will definitely help making open source knowledge more accessible to average developers, not able/willing to spend hours/days to dissect code. looking forward on Danny Sullivan’s commentary on Code Search… [...]
[...] while I tend to find most widget-engines quite generic and similar in featuresets, SpringWidgets is unique in several ways: while competing platforms run their widgets either on the local desktop (f.e. Yahoo! Widgets, ex Konfabulator) or exclusively on the web (f.e. Google Gadgets), SpringWidgets’ code can be executed in both environments. widgets like the RSS-reader on the sidebar of this page, can be easily pulled to the desktop by just clicking the green cog (top-left). the desktop-software SpringBox is currently available for Windows only, with a Mac OS-version to follow soon. SpringWidgets integration with several social networking-sites is even better: widgets can be sent to profile pages on myspace, friendster, hi5 and xanga with a single click. as usual, html-snippets are used to get SpringWidgets on any other webpage (see screenshot below). [...]