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Google Spreadsheet Storage

I was pleasantly surprised that Google offered an API to Google Calendar, but I’m much more eager to hear whether an API will be available for Google Spreadsheet. The potential there seems huge! The “Hello World’s” could be “Web servers that upload traffic summaries nightly”, or “Screen scrapers that build price-comparison spreadsheets.” This is Grade-A mashup material!

Once you have an API you can also take this thing MUCH further by writing a database driver library or ORM that can map queries to rows and build spreadsheets per-table for your database. Obviously you’re not going to be replacing a large, loaded database with this, but think about swapping out “Google Spreadsheet Storage” for small tasks that you might otherwise use sqlite for. Especially if there’s a driver that integrates right into your web framework. For example, let’s say your new “In Private Beta” web app has a “Sign up to be notified about our launch” form on the front page. Where do you want those email address to go? You probably want it in a spreadsheet anyway, so why not have the web app just post it into a private Google Spreadsheet automagically? Having the web-based spreadsheet UI also means you can review, edit, and export the data in a slick, phpmyadmin-like way!