A small Step For Google – Web Elements
Today Google announced a number of new product features at their Developer conference in San Francisco. Although there was an announcement about an Android Developer challenge and all conference attendees received a free Android Phone, the most interesting, and at the same time disappointing announcement, was Google Web Elements.
Web Elements allows anyone to drop a snipet of code into a website and have access to a number of Google products. That is the interesting part. The disappointment came from the initial five products: Calendar, Conversation, Custom Search, Maps, News, and Presentations. Other than conversations, this seems like a rather dull set of features. Sure, all are useful, but not that exciting.
The conversations element lets visitors post comments directly to a website and the website owner can control the scope of comments. They can either be shared across the web, or restricted to the original website. Also, website owners can select a topic for the conversation. Fairly basic, but a good interactive feature. If this is a response to Twitter, it’s a little weak.
This seems to be Google’s push to be to integrate Google Friend Connect into sites around the world. This is evidenced by the automatic language translation feature that is included. As you would expect, this feature automatically translates a comment into the visitor’s preferred language. That has a lot of potential, especially if you have an international audience.
Day 2 is tomorrow. Hopefully the best is yet to come.
