Google+ has only been around for a mere 2 months yet I already feel like writing about it is old hat. In the short time that the social networking service as been around its had a positive debut to the early adopter market, seen wild user growth and even had to tackle some hard issues like their user name policy and user engagement. I said very early on that Google had a major battle on their hands when they decided to launch another volley at an another silicone valley giant but early indicators were pointing towards them at least being a highly successful niche product at the very least, if for the only fact that they were simply “Facebook that wasn’t Facebook“.
One of the things that was always lacking from the service was an API that was on the same level as its competitors. Both Facebook and Twitter both have exceptional APIs that allow services to deeply integrate with them and, at least in the case of Twitter, are responsible in a large part for their success. Google was adamant that an API was on the way and just under a week ago they delivered on their promise, releasing an API for Google+:
Developers have been waiting since late June for Google to release their API to the public. Well, today is that Day. Just a few minute ago Chris Chabot, from Google+ Developer Relations, announced that the Google+ API is now available to the public. The potential for this is huge, and will likely set Google+ on a more direct path towards social networking greatness. We should see an explosion of new applications and websites emerge in the Google+ community as developers innovate, and make useful tools from the available API. The Google+ API at present provides read-only access to public data posted on Google+ and most of the Google+ API follows a RESTful API design, which means that you must use standard HTTP techniques to get and manipulate resources.
Like all their APIs the Google+ one is very well documented and even the majority of their client libraries have been updated to include the new API. Looking over the documentation it appears that there’s really only 2 bits of information available to developers at this point in time, those being public Profiles (People) and activities that are public. Supporting these APIs is the OAuth framework so that users can authorize external applications so that they can access their data on Google+. In essence this is a read only API for things that were already publicly accessible which really only serves to eliminate the need to screen scrape the same data.
I’ll be honest, I’m disappointed in this API. Whilst there are some useful things you can do with this data (like syndicating Google+ posts to other services and reader clients) the things that I believe Google+ would be great at doing aren’t possible until applications can be given write access to my stream. Now this might just be my particular use case since I usually use Twitter for my brief broadcasts (which is auto-syndicated to Facebook) and this blog for longer prose (which is auto shared to Twitter) so my preferred method of integration would be to have Twitter post stuff to my Google+ feed. Because as it is right now my Google+ account is a ghost town compared to my other social networks simply because of the lack of automated syndication.
Of course I understand that this isn’t the final API, but even as a first attempt it feels a little weak.
Whilst I won’t go as far as to say that Google+ is dying there is data to suggest that the early adopter buzz is starting to wind down. Anecdotally my feed seems to mirror this trend with average time between posts on there being days rather than minutes it is on my other social networks. The API would be the catalyst required to bring that activity back up to those initial levels but I don’t think it’s capable of doing so in its current form. I’m sure that Google won’t be a slouch when it comes to releasing new APIs but they’re going to have to be quick about it if they want to stem the flood of inactivity.
I really want to use Google+, I really do it’s just that the lack of interoperability that keeps all my data out of it. I’m sure in the next couple months we’ll see the release of a more complete API that will enable me to use the service as I, and many others I feel, use our other social networking services.
