According to a post today on The Official Google Blog, the engineers in Mountain View truly want to please end users. Jonathan Rochelle and Nir Bar-Lev, for example, both product managers for Big G, have explained their fascination with how people of all sorts have used Google Docs software package - more specifically, Google Spreadsheets - to calculate finances, manage sports groups and teams, log beer taste tests, etc. The list goes on and on.
The way Google is going about this new openness effort for the Docs package is to launch two tools: one being Gadgets-in-Docs, the other being a Visualization API. What can one two with these tools? Well, lots. Just to name a couple very basic examples, Gadgets-in-Docs lets you widgetize spreadsheets, allowing you to transfer them over to iGoogle for quick reference if need be. And the Visualization API “provides a common way to access structured data sources,” and thus enables developers to bring that data into one place in unique ways that wouldn’t normally be possible with Google Spreadsheets as it exists as standard.
For those users and developers that may seek to customize the status quo to better fit their needs and/or the needs of others, the API can help quite a bit in meeting particular requirements.