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>> ALFRED: So, I'm Derrick Alfred (ph) from the New York Times. I'm a Software Architect
there. And we use Google on a number of places. We've used the Maps API for our real estate
and travel sections. We've used CSE to power our site search. We've also more recently
used some of the data APIs around portable contacts to do a social graph import for our
TimesPeople application. >> So, you chose to use the Google APIs, the
AJAX APIs, tell us a bit about how you came to this decision.
>> ALFRED: So, one of the reasons we wanted to use the Google APIs is user familiarity.
So, people are really used to the Google Maps experience. They know the look and feel. Has
wide adoption. So, it's a comfortable fit for our users. It has great coverage and it
is easy to work with, so we've been able to do a lot of interesting overlays that really
complement the data and the journalism that we do on top of it.
>> So, as developers, we really value being able to share war stories and lessons, technical
challenges, tell us about one particularly difficult period of development phase on how
you approached the technical challenge. >> ALFRED: So, recently, we have a social
layer that puts on top of nytimes.com called TimesPeople. And one of our challenges has
been importing social graph and so we've used the Google Contacts API and the newer implementation
of portable contacts. So, I think the real difficulty for us has been or the challenge
has been the kind of evolving standard around that and so we were really excited to see
Google adopt portable contacts. And so, luckily for us, we actually just--we didn't operate
fast enough but the way we solve some of our technical problems is that we waited long
enough for Google to embrace the standard and allow us to reuse some existing code that
we already had, so that was really exciting for us.
>> So, what are some of the benefits to your app of using the APIs?
>> ALFRED: So, I think our TimesPeople social application really benefits from using portable
contacts and since that Google Contacts and Gmail have such a wide adoption, it enables
people to get up on our TimesPeople social layer much easier. So, by importing those
friends, we're able to start using TimesPeople and be a lot more productive from the get-go.
>> Has using the APIs reduced the amount of work for you?
>> ALFRED: I think definitely using the APIs has reduced the amount of work. In some ways
it's not just reduced the amount of work but it's made things possible where it might not
have been possible otherwise. So, if there's certain things that we, you know, might not
have--ever have done in terms of our real estate and showing maps and where things are
and putting the overlays on that--without something like Google Maps, I'm not sure how
we would have done it. >> What kinds of features of were made possible
by having access to produce APIs? >> ALFRED: So, some of the interesting features
we've done with Google Maps around our travel and destination sites, we're able to kind
of plot a lot more stuff and show the same content that we have kind of in a list or
tabular form actually laid out geographically and it really enables--users get a sense of
how to start to plan their trips and think about the places they're going to visit. So,
it's really greatly and rich start travel site.
>> What are some of the features you're planning to implement to your application?
>> ALFRED: Well, we continue to look at all the Google APIs as they come out and trying
to figure out which ones we can leverage to take advantage of. And so, I think, things
that are around the social--open social stuff are really interesting and as we see some
of the more advanced features around CSE coming on board with the customized search, I think
there is great potential for us to kind of leverage some of the newer stuff there as
well.