Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Through it’s API, Google is starting to define its OS for outside developers. The main characteristic of the OS seems to be its web simplicity. Everything has of course a URL. Google defines “kinds”, which are major content types, like “event” or “message”. A message can be an email, a blog entry, a comment or anything like that.

So Google’s services (calendar, mail, …) use a common language and common content types (”kinds”). This promises to be powerful stuff, and as we’ve seen with the opening of Amazon’s S3: we’re just getting started.

Common Elements:”Kinds”: “The collection of elements that together describe a contact is called the Contact “kind.” Some of the elements in the Contact kind are ordinary Atom or RSS elements; others are defined by Google in a namespace called the “Google data namespace.” By convention, the Google data namespace is usually referred to in XML code using the gd: alias; for example, the element that contains a telephone or fax number is . The schema URL for the Google data namespace is http://schemas.google.com/g/2005.

Google defines other kinds as well: Event (a collection of standardized elements that together represent a calendar event) and Message (a collection of elements representing an email message, discussion group posting, blog entry, or other message).”

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Information architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.