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Comment by grinich | Hacker News Reader

Kind of crazy the Google Cloud team is using gmail.js to build this extension. Gmail.js is a side project by Kartik Talwar who just graduated college and the codebase isn't exactly active.

I guess even Google can't find a good way to extend Gmail with their own APIs...

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Google isn't a monolith. The author is on one team that wanted a way to encourage use of its services. They used an open source project to achieve it. Doesn't seem _that_ crazy to do rather than wait for some other team to build you an API.

The original comment is meant as an observation rather than an attack. It's great to see the author of the post use gmail.js to quickly get the sentiment analysis working with 30 lines of code.

The library was a fun side project and has been used by many companies (big and small) over the past few years. Its always nice to see someone make a cool extension on top of gmail.

Here is another one that came out a while ago (uses gmail.js) and on the same theme as this original post:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/12/29/new_chrome_a...

Thanks for the library! It's super awesome, useful, and easy to use. And yes, it made writing this ridiculously simple, it's borderline embarrassing how little code I wrote, but that was also part of what made it neat to me.

This was just a "let's spend a few hours playing with the Natural Language API" hack day type thing. Robbie's comment perfectly explains the context behind it. Google search pointed me to your library, which fit the need perfectly well, so that's what I used and I really appreciate that you wrote it and gave it permissive license!

^ waprin is the author of the blog post

I think we all understand why this is happening, but its still funny.

I also think the Chrome team might be unhappy that the blog post confuses the terms "plugin" and "extension". So yea, Google is not a monolith.

lol

(hey folks downvoting... this comment is by Kartik Talwar.)

Hah. Cheers for building what's apparently the best option available!

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