Interactive XMPP demos

We hope you've been enjoying the new XMPP API we shipped in App Engine release 1.2.5. We're always impressed with the cool scenarios our developers create!

A couple of Google engineers found the time to create cool App Engine demos using the XMPP API and we'd like to share them with you.

CrowdGuru - this app, courtesy of App Engine Developer Programs Engineer Nick Johnson, is a fun trivia game which crowdsources answers. Add crowdguru@appspot.com to your IM list and ask it a question. You can read up on full details of the design and implementation here.

Multi-Chat - David Symonds wasn't satisfied with simple person-to-person IM, so he built an IRC-like chat room system! Add multi-chat@appspot.com to your IM list and message it "/help" to find out how you can join channels and start chatting it up. Full source is available here, and a basic web interface is here.

Of course, please note that these apps are solely intended to demonstrate the power of the XMPP API - they are not official products in any form, nor are they supported. In particular, don't send any private or personally identifying information when chatting with these bots.

But definitely try them out and let us know what cool app experiences you are building with App Engine!

Posted by the Google App Engine Team

AdSense for Mobile optimized for high-end phones

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

High-end mobile phones, like iPhone, Android-powered devices and the Palm Pre, continue to grow — Gartner estimates that global sales of smartphones will soar by 27% in 2009, to 177 million units. Naturally, as a result more and more people are browsing the web on the go.

Because these devices offer a browsing experience that is similar to desktop computers, advertising on smartphones is a natural extension for any AdWords campaign. However, it's not always been easy for advertisers to reach people on smartphones. That's why we're investing in new high-end mobile advertising products such as our search ad options for high-end phones and AdSense for mobile applications. We hope to make advertising on high-end mobile devices as intuitive, effective and user-friendly as our existing AdWords tools.

Today, we're excited to announce a new feature for our AdSense mobile publishers that enables them to serve text and image ads on their sites — specifically on these high-end smartphones. This helps mobile publishers earn revenue and fund more mobile-specific sites and web content.

New features like this help to nurture the smartphone ecosystem by encouraging the creation of more mobile content and by helping advertisers to grow their businesses by reaching new audiences. Our users' experience is also improved, with increasingly relevant and device-optimized mobile ads that load faster and fit better on small screens.

For more info about this feature, check out the Inside AdSense Blog.



Posted by Danielle VanDyke, Software Engineer