Well, if you've tried making a Gmail gadget, it involves unnecessary XML wrangling, many separate pages of documentation, and is nowhere near as simple as it co

Well, if you've tried making a Gmail gadget, it involves unnecessary XML wrangling, many separate pages of documentation, and is nowhere near as simple as it could be. Stripe/Square vs. Paypal show how a good API can transform a category. Moreover Gmail Gadgets are not heavily promoted nor a profit center for Google, so they are an afterthought. As indirect proof of this, when pg had that recent thread on fixing email, had the Gmail API (+ Gadgets) been a strong API for working with email, people would have brought that up as the obvious solution. As for OpenSocial, that seemed to me to be big companies banding against Facebook, not actually opening up the web. But we can agree to disagree here.