The Google Picker API

 

Users have content across many Google properties: YouTube, Picasa Web Albums, Google Docs, and more. Now we have a common interface for your users to select Google content. The Google Picker API provides a familiar-looking dialog box that’s easy for you to integrate into your apps. Your users can quickly browse their own content without ever leaving your page or app.

Perhaps you’re developing a blogging platform and you want your users to be able to embed their Picasa Web Albums photos. You can even let your users pick from public content, as found from image and video search.

Once the Picker is invoked by your user, a modal dialog appears on the page. If the user is already signed in to their Google account, they’ll see their content in just a second or two. If not, the user will be asked to sign in.

Integrating with the Google Picker API is straightforward. First, you specify which Google services should show up as options in the Picker navigation. For example, if you’re a photo site, you may choose to show Picasa and Google Image Search, but hide Google Docs and other services. Then, you simply specify a callback function that will be called as soon as the user’s data is returned to your application.

var picker = new google.picker.PickerBuilder().
    addView(google.picker.ViewId.IMAGE_SEARCH).
    setCallback(pickerCallback).
    build();
picker.setVisible(true);

You can find more integration details and examples in the documentation. We hope you enjoy this new API!

Google Prediction API and all apps

Now your apps can get smarter with as little as a single line of code. They can learn to continually adapt to changing conditions and to integrate new information. This week at Google I/O, we’re making the Google Prediction API generally available, meaning you can create apps with these capabilities for yourself. Additionally, we’re introducing several significant new features, including:

  • The ability to stream data and tune your predictive models
  • A forthcoming gallery of user-developed, pre-built models to add smarts even faster.

The Google Prediction API can be used by almost any app to recommend the useful, extract the essential, and automate the repetitive. For example:

  • Recommend a new movie to a customer.
  • Identify most important customers.
  • Automatically tag posts with relevant flags.

For example, Ford Motor Co. Research is working to use the Prediction API to optimize plug-in hybrid vehicle fuel efficiency by optionally providing users with likely destinations to choose from, and soon, optimizing driving controls to conserve fuel. Because the API is a cloud-hosted RESTful service, Ford has been able to access its computationally-intensive machine learning algorithms to find patterns that rank potential destinations based on previous driving paths. Ford will be demonstrating their work at the API’s I/O Session.

Here’s a summary of the features we added to the API today:

  • Streaming training data: Continually incorporate feedback for fast-adapting systems (e.g. user-chosen tags vs predicted ones, final purchases vs expected).
  • General availability: Anyone can now sign up to use the API. Paid users also receive a 99.9% SLA with increased quota.
  • New JavaScript library: Now deploy the Prediction API in your JavaScript – in addition to our updated Python and Java libraries.

Today, we are also announcing the Prediction API’s forthcoming gallery of pre-trained third party predictive models (try these demo models right now), and we will be adding more constantly (maybe yours – waitlist). Once complete, all Prediction API users will be able to:

  • Subscribe to others’ models: improve your apps with others’ predictive data tools.
  • Sell access to your models (e.g. sentiment analysis on social media).
  • Import customized models through the open-standard PMML encoding.

See our recent blog post for even more ideas, and get started at the Google APIs Console.

Thanks to our community of preview developers, who have played a crucial role in helping us make the Google Prediction API simpler and more powerful since its announcement last year at I/O 2010. We are thrilled to invite all developers to join them.