Google Developer Day US - A Computing System for the World's

A Computing System for the World's Information: A Look Behind the Scenes at Google
Jeff Dean




When collecting, indexing, and organizing large amounts of information using thousands of unreliable computers, one quickly discovers that the right software infrastructure can make all the difference. In this talk, we'll discuss our underlying computing hardware, and the design principles and implementations of GFS, MapReduce and BigTable, three internal systems that are used at Google for a wide variety of purposes.

Speaker Bio:Jeff joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Google Fellow in Google's Systems Infrastructure Group. While at Google he has worked on Google's crawling, indexing, query serving, and advertising systems, implemented a number of search quality improvements, built various pieces of Google's distributed computing infrastructure, and worked on a variety of internal and external developer tools.

Google Earth adds Hiking Trails!

Want to scout out some hikes before your next trip? Google Earth's new layer has hundreds of them.

Specifically, the Trimble Outdoors Trips layer features GPS-marked trails for activities including hiking, biking, backpacking and running. The info includes directions to trailheads, a difficulty ranking, and notes on interesting sights to see along the way. Some legs also include photos, audio and even video clips. But here's where it really gets interesting: One click sends the trip info straight to your phone--and if it's a GPS-enabled phone, you can get the actual coordinates as well (as opposed to just the map).

Users can, of course, submit their own hike routes as well. To see the new layer in action, fire up Google Earth and look under the Featured Content tree in the Layers pane. Then dig out your backpack.
Google Earth [via Official Google Blog]

Google launches My Maps

Create, annotate and share personalized maps with My Maps, a new addition to Google Maps.

To get started, just head to the site and click the My Maps tab. Create a new map, choose whether to make it public or private (the former makes it available in searches), then start marking it up. You can add places, draw lines and shapes, and even incorporate hosted photos and videos (though only by adding the appropriate HTML to a placemark's description). When you're done, you can share the map (it gets its own URL) or create a KML file for use in Google Earth.

Windows Live Maps offers similar functionality (and has better drawing tools), but Google raises the bar a bit with its video and KML support. Plus, My Maps is much easier to work with. How will you use this tool?