The App Engine team picked up the Giftag/App Engine case study and put it out on some blogs.  Thanks for the love- we appreciate it.

Google Code Blog

Google App Engine Developer Blog

Giftag is gift registry Add On for FireFox and Explorer. It lets you pick things from any site, add them to a list, and share that list where ever you want. Its free, it supports open standards, and its recently been re-platformed on Google App Engine.
Here’s a quick recap from our development team about why we chose GAE, what we like about it, what APIs we use, what we wish it had, and a few tips for people getting started on GAE.


Here are links to the documentation mentioned:
Sharding Counters by Joe Gregario

Paging on GAE by Joe Gregario

Building Scalable Apps by Brett Slatkin

GAEGene Library Contributed by Giftag

Hope its helpful. Let us know what you think.

One of the goals in developing Giftag was to learn a bleeding edge technology (Google App Engine) and to provide any useful code/design patterns we created back to the community.  Gaegene, licensed under the Apache License 2.0, is the result of that goal.

This first release of the library (Download v0.1: ZIP, GZ or BZ2) contains two modular applications to assist with sharded counters and slugs.  Future releases will add support/utilities for images, pagination, and tags.  The repository and documentation are hosted on bitbucket.org.

If you’re a GAE developer (or even if you’re just contemplating a GAE webapp), give the Gaegene Wiki a look.  It contains usage examples and detailed public APIs.  There is also a testing App Engine webapp that serves both as an example of Gaegene uses and a set of functional tests (with nearly 100% code coverage).  It utilizes the Django web framework and the App Engine Patch project.

As always, we welcome and encourage any and all feedback, patches, and enhancements.  We’re all in this together, so let’s keep giving.

At long last the Giftag Firefox add-on is no longer under ‘experimental’ status. Firefox approved the add-on today so you can download it direct from addons.mozilla.org. But wait - now we need to update it on Mozilla - the latest version, 2.4, is still only available here. Doh. We’ll get that fixed right away.

Anyway, here’s what the people are saying:

• LOVE it!

  Giftag is the best and continues to get better with each release. I can’t wait to send all my wishes to my family for Christmas time, then a month later for my birthday!

  by KCB48 on October 7, 2008

• greatest thing ever

  I freakin love this app. This is going to make gift shopping (and giving hints) SO MUCH EASIER. No more trying to make 20 different registries for all the different stores. This keeps it all in one place! The ony thing is it can be a little confusing at first but after a few minutes I was shopping all over the internet.

  by Rebecca Kay on October 7, 2008

• Giftag

  Super slick. I like picking something and having it show up in my gift bar. Makes me greedy! It’s cool that I can pick things from any store, plus post things like a listing for a house I want (see the greedy part, previously mentioned).

  by Jackie Osking on October 7, 2008

Giftag browser plugins (v0.2.4) now use http://remix.bestbuy.com/ to pull in product information when hProduct isn’t available on BestBuy.com.

Want to find out how your site can implement the hProduct microformat spec? Let us know, we’ll help you.

Recently Read Write Web did an article about wish lists for the Holiday. Gratefully, Giftag was number two on the list.

“In September we blogged about Giftag, a social shopping service that uses open standards. Created by leading retailer Best Buy, Giftag is a browser plugin that lets you make online wishlists and share them with your friends. The technology will be integrated into Best Buy’s web site in the coming months. Specifically, Giftag uses the microformat hProduct - an emerging data standard that is embedded in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. It’s similar to the microformats hListing and hReview. There’s also a Facebook app. A word of warning though: one of our commenters noted some privacy issues with Giftag.”

That last sentence is a killer. The reality is that the problem was more of a communication issue than a privacy issue. It was unlcear that all Giftag lists are public by default. The user mentioned above was under the impression that list are and should be private by default. We apologize for the misunderstanding.

We actually think lists are more fun if they’re public. It’s fun to share stuff you want and it’s fun to discover stuff others want - stuff you may have never heard of before. That said, we understand sometimes there is a need for private lists and private lists on Giftag are just that - private. You make it private and you set permissions for which buddies you want to have access and what kind of access you want them to have. In the future we’ll be ading even more fine-grained control over how you can set permission.

But at the heart of Giftag is the social aspect. Sharing and discovery.

Albert Maruggi interviewed me about Giftag and some other stuff for the Marketing Edge Podcast.

…Giftag is the new gift-registry builder and community platform from Best Buy’s social media team. The best part about it is — get this — it is based on the fundamental principle that the social web is, well, social. That’s why it allows users to build lists from anywhere on the web – not just Best Buy. In my Xmas 2008 list I have warm and toasty long johns (I live in Minnesota, give me a break) from REI, and at Best Buy, an excellent Samsung 46” 1080p flat panel HDTV for an unbelievable price…

Marketing Edge Podcast

Gary, Steve, and Curtis showed off Giftag at DEMO Fall 08 this week. Check out their full presentation here, and check out the application at giftag.com.