Enhancing the Google APIs Console, one page at a time

Ion

Chris

By Ion Constantinescu and Chris Cartland, APIs Console Team

It's been nearly one year since we launched the Google APIs Console to help you manage API usage across your sites and apps. We've had some great feedback about what you like (and don't), and are working hard every day to improve the overall experience. To this end, we want to highlight a number of recent enhancements.

Introducing v2 of the Google APIs Console Traffic Reports Page

The Google APIs Console contains a list of traffic reports that display information about how the APIs enabled per project are being used. Based on customer feedback, we've made a few enhancements:

• We have consolidated all API traffic in a single display.
• We now compare traffic between multiple APIs in a single project.
• We now show demographic and usage data about your API requests.

New traffic reports page

We believe we have made the Traffic Reports page cleaner and more compact without losing any functionality. We already have a list of enhancements we want to make to the page, and we would love to hear from you to help drive our prioritization.

Demographic data is available from traffic reports

Introducing the Google APIs Console Dashboard

You told us that you want to jump into a project's page and see more of a dashboard that describes what's happening on your project. You said you want to see which services are enabled, the availability of said services, general project administration, and a quick link to how much the project costs to run.

New APIs Console Dashboard

Our new Dashboard page is the first step in delivering on this experience. We will continue to enhance the Dashboard based on your collective feedback, so please take a look and let us know what you think.

New APIs Available in the Google APIs Console

We'd also like to announce some APIs are now available in the Console:

Web Fonts Developer API: this gives access to the metadata available for all families served by Google Web Fonts. You can create dynamic apps that can query Google Web Fonts and get an accurate list of the families currently available.

Google Orkut v2 REST API: this enables you to access select Orkut features. This API works like an extension of the JSON-RPC off-site application API, although it uses a different protocol.

Google Analytics Management API v3: this provides read-only access to Google Analytics configuration data. With the Management API you can list all the Account, Web Property and Profile information for a user, retrieve a Profile ID to use with the Data Export API, determine which goals are active and access their configured names, and retrieve a user's Custom Segments to apply them to Data Export API queries.

Blogger JSON API: this allows client applications to view and update Blogger content in the form of Google Data API feeds. Your client application can use the Blogger Data API to create new blog posts, edit and delete existing blog posts, and query for blog posts that match particular criteria.

We will continue to make changes and update our systems to make your development experience as great as possible. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please contact us.


Ion Constantinescu is a Google Software Engineer working on the Google APIs Console. He has an academic background in Artificial Intelligence in the field of web service technologies.

Chris Cartland is a former Google Associate Product Manager Intern who worked on the Google APIs Console. He is currently helping CalSol - UC Berkeley's Solar Vehicle Team that designs and builds solar cars capable of racing at highway speeds - prepare to compete in the 2011 Veolia World Solar Challenge in Australia.


Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor