Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers, the company's lingua franca for encoding various types of data, in order to set the stage for a wave of new releases, according to official company blog posts and documents.

"Practically everyone inside Google" uses protocol buffers, states a FAQ page. "We have many other projects we would like to release as open source that use protocol buffers, so to do this, we needed to release protocol buffers first."

Google uses "thousands of different data formats to represent networked messages between servers, index records in repositories, geospatial datasets, and more," wrote Kenton Varda, a member of Google's software engineering team, in a blog post. "Most of these formats are structured, not flat. This raises an important question: How do we encode it all?"

Full article: pcworld.com 

Labels: data, languages, Open Source, protocol

YouTube will launch nine country specific versions of YouTube today.

YouTube local versions will be available for Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the U.K, complete with relative country specific domains such as youtube.fr and youtube.jp.

The new sites include fully translated site content and will eventually deliver country specific popular content.

Read more: techcrunch.com 

Labels: international, languages, local, youtube