I went to the Google Developer Day in Sydney today. It was pretty interesting, even if I can’t say I learnt much new, perhaps becuase I concentrated on sessions about AppEngine and OpenSocial.

The AppEngine ones were excellent, but unfortunately I’d previously watched the video of the same talk from Google I/O. The OpenSocial sessions weren’t as good. I think they suffered a little from being unclear about the exact audience they were pitched at. In particular they seemed to jump around from assuming you knew nothing at all about open social to assuming you understood the difference between a gadget, a container, a REST server and Shindig.

The final session was an OpenSocial code lab, which involved the audience attempting to copy down random tiny urls to pages we saw for a few seconds. If you missed one of the URLs then nothing you tried would work for you afterwards. We used the iGoogle sandbox as a container, which seems to be pretty buggy and confusing. On the upside I did have a good conversation with John Hjelmstad about Shindig etc, as well as some interesting ideas he had for CSS spriteing.

By all accounts, the Gears & Android sessions were really good, so perhaps I should have gone to them instead.

Finally, my team at work were fortunate enough to be one of six finalists for the Google Speedgeeking prize, which seems to be a prize for the best mashups done using a Google API. We didn’t win, but we got a trophy anyway.