Looking in to some difficulties we may encounter when trying to remotely access google data services with URL requests only:

• Authentication – http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/AuthForInstalledApps.html details how we may request a service token which can be used for further data requests.  Each token is service specific so here’s a list of services and their (not obvious) names http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/faq.html#clientlogin
• List Spreadsheets? – once we know a spreadsheet’s name / key we can make queries against it, but how do we get a list of spreadsheets?
• column name resolution? – google identifies all their columns using ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’… from left to right.  What we refer to as the column name they call the label.  Queries are made using the identifiers and not the labels so changing column order changes the query results.  We may not care though…