Thank You, Beta Testers!

So the secret can now be told - AdSense Dashboard has been a skunkworks project to test Google’s prototype AdSense API.

Together, we generated enough traffic to verify the production-readiness of the API; thanks for enduring the occasional downtime as we got the API ready for the masses and for its public release, and thanks to the AdSense API team for doing such amazing work under difficult time schedules and a rather large amount of pressure from me on the shape and form of the API.

This isn’t the end of AdSense Dashboard - in fact, it’s just the beginning. But for now, the limelight belongs to our API launch.

Read the complete Adsense API Announcement

If you’d like more information on the API, you’ll find the public documentation is now available. Now that we’re public, I’ll be changing the auth method from ClientLogin (which reported “AdSense” as the permissions it wanted when you attached an account) to the OAuth endpoint for the API, at which point it will tell you that it wants read-only access to the API, further limiting the set of permissible actions that can be taken by the code.

Thanks again to everyone who’s installed the product and helped us test our API.

AdSense Dashboard 2.6

I’ve been pumping out dashboard changes for the last few days, based on feedback, bug reports, and general email discussions with users. Keep them coming - if you use the app, I want to hear from you.

Users on Eclair/Froyo got bit by a pretty nasty bug in the HTTP stack built into the phone; the common fix appears to be to not use that API on those platforms, so that’s what I’m doing.

New stuff:

• Support for disabling auto-refresh.
• Bugfixes for Eclair/Froyo. If it’s not fixed for you, I want to hear about it.
• Device-specific compatibility bugfixes around currency and rounding.
• Google TV support. This is a bit slapdash - I’ll improve it as I improve the tablet layout.
• New widget (released as part of the 2.5 chain) by a contributor/coworker.

There’s a lot of activity going on this weekend and early next week; I intend to do a lot of ‘remastering’ of the numeric portion of the display to show more comparative data - today versus yesterday, today verus one week ago, this week verus last week, this month versus last month, etc., for a broader set of metrics than we currently include.

That will also be extracted into widget form - choose an arbitrary 1x1 fact.

Lifetime spend, custom channels, and url channels will also show up, in all probability.

Your feedback isn’t just welcome - it’s wanted. Ping me with your gripes, comments, suggestions, and requests.