Google punts self cut-and-paste

Google I/O Google has launched an online service designed to facilitate the addition of various Google stuff onto your webpages, including Google Maps maps, Google News feeds, and YouTube videos.

Introduced this morning at the company's Google I/O developer conference in downtown San Francisco, the new online service - dubbed Google Web Elements - lets you add Google services to a page by cutting and pasting pre-defined code snippets. Think YouTube's Embed option.

"Google Web Elements bring Google products to people's web pages using copy and paste," said DeWitt Clinton, technical manager of Google's developer relations team. "We've seen this for years with YouTube videos, with AdSense. But what we've done with this launch is do this across a broader range of products."

At the moment, the service offers tools for hooking your site into Google Search, Calendar, Maps, News, spreadsheets and presentations built with Docs and Spreadsheets, YouTube video news feeds, and a Conversation tool that handles site comments.

Yes, you can already weave such services into your pages through various other means. Docs and Spreadsheets, for instance, offers a function that lets you add public documents to ordinary webpages. And there's the aforementioned YouTube example. But Web Elements adds a handful of brand-new cut-and-paste tools and puts the lot in a single place.

The service is already live here. ®

Bootnote

Today at Google I/O the company also announced the second coming of its Android Developer Challenge, a Google-funded contest that awards cash prizes to developers with a knack for impressing Google-selected judges - and developers at large. Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra said that Developer Challenge 2 will also tally votes from the community, taking a page from American Idol. The winning app could receive up to a quarter of a million dollars in prize money.