AuthSub token has wrong scope

I was playing around with the Google Data API last night and I kept running into this error. The app I’m creating allows me to pull down a list of Google Calendars and then insert a new entry into the calendar that I select. Pulling the list was the easy part, adding a new entry was the tough part.

My problem was that I was declaring a ‘scope’ that was too limiting for any additional calls to the API. Instead of declaring the scope for ‘allcalendars’, I reduced the scope to the largest URI possible which is ‘http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds’

Be sure to read this this doc about using AuthSub with JavaScript before diving into the Google Data API http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/authsub-js.html

Google and Enterprise CRM

The post on Mashable and TechCrunch about the latest venture between Google and Salesforce does create a rather unique situation in the realm of CRM. Does this bring an even bigger player into the CRM space? One can argue that the CRM space that Salesforce resides in, software as a service (SaaS) differs greatly from the space that on-premise CRM solutions such as Oracle/Siebel, Consona CRM, Microsoft CRM. But observing the way that software in general is moving toward these days, SaaS and Cloud Computing are starting to slowly make a big impact. It’s hard to say right now if Google will acquire Salesforce in order to extend their reach into the enterprise space, but if they do, it’ll definitely make my work more interesting.

Google App Engine

I see Google’s new App Engine as a way for Google to employ thousands of new developers. Also instead of paying them, the developers pay Google to use their servers and manage their scalability. Unlike Amazon’s Web Services which breaks it into separate components with EC2 and S3, you are kinda restricted to using Google’s GFS and BigTable. Currently Python is the only available scripting tool but when they start offering PHP and Java, I think development will really take off. Once a company creates an amazing application with this new tool, Google can simply acquire that company and not have to worry about retooling the new application to work in their environment.