I have seen a couple different posts pose the question, “What would Google do?” I am taking a different tact. I work for a large organization making web applications. The web applications are used by external clients, but there is a rather limited group of users. Limited as compared to an application that is designed for general use on the Internet.
So, sometimes there are challenges developing our applications. I try to use Google as inspiration for coming up with creative solutions to the challenges.
To start this column out, let’s begin with a common task: uploading data files. Assume that you have a feature that uploads a batch data file. How should the file be formatted? This is a situation where I might ask, “What would Google do?” There are a couple different data uploads that Google supports.
Google Base is a service that provides a data feed. Google Base provides a way to describe structured data that will be included in a Google search. Here is more information about the data feed.
Google Apps, Google’s hosted applications like email, word process, and spreadsheet, has a data feed for provisioning users. They call this a Provisioning API.
In upcoming posts, I plan to look deeper into both of these data uploads that Google supports to help answer the question, “What would Google do?”