Google+ API Launch Still Months Away(techcrunch.com)
techcrunch.com
Google+ API Launch Still Months Away
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/06/google-api-launch-still-months-away/
3 comments
I agree.
Google+ got a lot of momentum, and then it all slowed to a crawl. And once the real names stuff broke, and got it a bunch of bad press, the traffic seemed to slow to a crawl over there.
I worry that they're going to leave it too late - that by the time they have a product worth having they'll have lost their customer base.
Google+ got a lot of momentum, and then it all slowed to a crawl. And once the real names stuff broke, and got it a bunch of bad press, the traffic seemed to slow to a crawl over there.
I worry that they're going to leave it too late - that by the time they have a product worth having they'll have lost their customer base.
They certainly seem to have thrown away a lot of their advantage from the brilliantly-executed launch. If they had followed up quickly, and avoided the real names rathole, they were on track for a huge success. Now it'll be a much tougher path. I still think it'll be at least semi-successful, but it doesn't seem as likely to take significant market share away from Facebook or Twitter any time soon.
So, are there any ghetto homebrew APIs that just talk to Google+ via POST and GET requests? I've found something that lets me crosspost something to both twitter and Facebook, and it's annoying having to do it explicitly in Google+ as a separate action.
There is also an early API written for Node.js providing profile information and a user's posts as rss/atom/json (also available as npm package): https://github.com/fhemberger/googleplus-scraper
It's still read only, though – haven't seen anything writing back to G+ yet. All approaches to share/crosspost rely either on monitoring your public posts or sharing posts with a special bot user, which is linked to other services like twitter via oauth.
It's still read only, though – haven't seen anything writing back to G+ yet. All approaches to share/crosspost rely either on monitoring your public posts or sharing posts with a special bot user, which is linked to other services like twitter via oauth.
See the penultimate paragraph of the article.
Looks like that just reads Google+ data, but doesn't actually post anything back to it.
Shouldn't they have started with an API? Facebook tacked on their API later and look how well that's worked. Facebook's API is horrible, just figuring out how to use the login system is extremely painful.
Google should have built an API first, and built their own Google+ website on it.
Google should have built an API first, and built their own Google+ website on it.
Any time I work with a Google API I am literally surprised how beautifully engineered they are.
I trust Google on this one too -- so much in fact, I believe they already have such an API that the website is interacting with, it is just not mature enough to be publicly accessible.
I trust Google on this one too -- so much in fact, I believe they already have such an API that the website is interacting with, it is just not mature enough to be publicly accessible.
Agreed 100%. The only issue I have with Google APIs is wondering if they might get cancelled. The actual APIs are a joy to use compared to most sites'. They are well designed, well documented, and mostly consistent across different products (once you implement something using one Google API, the rest look pretty familiar if you use them later).
My guess is that they actually have an internal API that they used to build their own "user facing" app.
But, their challenge could be that making an API public involves more than just having the lines of code to do what is necessary. Especially at their scale.
But, their challenge could be that making an API public involves more than just having the lines of code to do what is necessary. Especially at their scale.
The great thing about G+ is it seems to be popular with a few really interesting people I like to follow who post more to G+ than they did on Twitter. However the lack of an API is preventing wider use and adoption. Right now there is no convenient way to say integrate your own blog and while I actually use the twitter website a lot more now, 3rd party tools are still the most popular way for people to organize their multiple social networks together..
Of course I realize API integration has it's dark side too, mostly in the form of spammers, but it's a small price to pay for having a more active community.