Google I/O 2008 presents

Summary: Recommended videos and presentations from the Google I/O 2008 developer conference in San Francisco.

Videos from the Google I/O 2008 sessions (and events) are finally available. If you are interested in subjects such as Google (in general), Ajax, Google APIs, Gears, OpenID, OAuth, and other developer-centric topics, here are some videos, which I would recommend (this list includes sessions which I attended, as well as sessions which I'm planning to watch, so I don't guarantee all of them to be interesting; I'll mark the ones that I haven't seen, yet, as such):

Keynotes

• Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud
  by Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering (1 hr 30 min)
  Vic is responsible for developer evangelism and open source programs at Google. He also oversees applications development. Previously, Vic spent 15 years at Microsoft, where he worked on a variety of products and operating systems, including Windows 3.0, NT, Windows XP, and Vista. This keynote offers a brief overview of technologies discussed at the conference and features several speakers including Allen Hurff (MySpace), Steve Horowitz, Kevin Gibbs, Mark Lucovsky, Bruce Johnson, David Glazer, and Nat Brown (iLike).
• Imagination, Immediacy, and Innovation... and a little glimpse under the hood at Google
  by Marissa Mayer, VP of Search and User Experience (1 hr)
  Marissa leads Google's product management efforts on search products – web search, images, news, books, products, maps, Google Earth, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Health, Google Labs, and more. This talk is a glimpse from inside the trenches of how Google builds products (including practical insights on how to build the best products), how to prioritize your efforts especially under resource constraints, and how to think about strategy.

AJAX & JavaScript

• Spice up Your Web Apps with AJAX APIs
  by Mark Lucovsky (Google) (57 min)
  Mark is an engineering director at Google and Google API lead. He previously worked for Microsoft, where he was part of the team that designed and built the Windows NT operating system. In this presentation, Mark shows how to use Google AJAX APIs to perform such tasks as downloading Atom and RSS feeds, search and display videos, images, news, maps, local business data, and do other things.
• Can We Get There From Here?
  by Alex Russell (SitePen) (1 hr 2 min)
  Alex is Project Lead for the Dojo Toolkit and Director of R&D at SitePen. He discusses the goods and bads of various Web technologies: HTML, HTTP, JavaScript, CSS, GWT (Google Web Toolkit), Flex, Silverlight, HTML 5, Gears, Ajax libraries, and more.
• State of Ajax: The Universe is Expanding
  by Dion Almaer (Google) and Ben Galbraith (Ajaxian.com) (56 min)
  Dion and Ben are the founders of Ajaxian.com. In this presentation, they discuss the latest Ajax developments, including multithreaded JavaScript technology-powered UIs, robust offline storage, choosing the right Ajax/JavaScript technology framework, Ajax outside of the browser, and more.
• HTML5, Brought to You by Gears*
  by Aaron Boodman (Google) (36 min)
  In addition to his daytime job at Google, where Aaron works with JavaScript, DHTML, and Ajax, he is also the author of youngpup.net, a weblog about web development; numerous open-source JavaScript libraries; and Greasemonkey, a popular user script manager for Firefox. In this talk, Aaron explains the purpose and mission of Gears.
• Even Faster Web Sites
  by Steve Souders (Google) (59 min)
  Steve is the author of High Performance Web Sites. At Google, he works on web performance and open source initiatives. In this talk, Steve discusses the best practices he's discovered, including the impact of iframes and where to place (and where not to place) inline script blocks.
• Improving Browsers in New Ways: Gears++
  by Chris Prince (Google) (49 min)
  Chris, who is a tech lead of the Google Gears development team, explains what the Gears technology is good for.

Social

• OpenSocial, OpenID, and OAuth: Oh, My!
  by Joseph Smarr (Plaxo) (1 hr)
  Joseph is a Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo, where he specializes in building intelligent applications, automated text processing, advanced interactive web apps, user interface design. Here Joseph explains how developers can take advantage of OpenID, OAuth, microformats, OpenSocial, the Social Graph API, friends-list portability, and other emerging standards and tools.

If you can recommend other sessions, please add a comment.

Additional references:
Videos from all Google I/O 2008 sessions
Description of all Google I/O 2008 sessions
Google I/O 2008