Google is holding its Google I/O developers’ conference in San Francisco this week, and among the bits of news from this morning’s keynote address is the launch of Google Web Elements, a new feature for adding snippets of information to a blog or personal site. The feature launches with Elements for embedding Google Calendars, Google News feeds, YouTube videos, presentations, spreadsheets, and more, with more to come.
Everything is very, very simple–you set an option or two, then get a snippet of code you can add to a page to embed the content–and I think everything that Elements lets you do can also be done by other means. But that’s sort of the point: Google says it’s trying to make grabbing content so easy that there’s no reason not to do so.
Elements doesn’t make embedding content utterly painless–you’ve still got to figure out how to get bits of JavaScript onto your site. I’d love to see someone figure out how to do something similar through drag-and-drop maneuvers only–no code required. And the Elements still aren’t universal, since not all sites allow for easy, unfettered embedding of JavaScript. (Ones hosted, like Technologizer, by WordPress.com don’t–which is why I haven’t embedded any Elements here by way of example. But here’s a static image of the Elements that Google is launching today:
