6 ms·

Google+ API Launch Still Months Away

23 points by jdp23 15y ago

lucisferre 15y ago
This is disappointing news. Watching G+ was a bit like watching a wave crash and roll back. My twitter feed actually slowed down for a few days while everyone played with the new kid, only to pick right back up again. 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.
- AndrewDucker 15y ago
  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.
  - jdp23 15y ago
    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.
wavephorm 15y ago
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.
- dshah 15y ago
  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.
- pestaa 15y ago
  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.
  - georgemcbay 15y ago
    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).
pavel_lishin 15y ago
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.
- brlewis 15y ago
  See the penultimate paragraph of the article.
  - pavel_lishin 15y ago
    Looks like that just reads Google+ data, but doesn't actually post anything back to it.
- mirrorskin 15y ago
  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 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.

23 points by jdp23 15y ago

This is disappointing news. Watching G+ was a bit like watching a wave crash and roll back. My twitter feed actually slowed down for a few days while everyone played with the new kid, only to pick right back up again. 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.

AndrewDucker 15y ago
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.
- jdp23 15y ago
  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.

wavephorm 15y ago

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.

dshah 15y ago
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.
pestaa 15y ago
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.
- georgemcbay 15y ago
  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).

pavel_lishin 15y ago

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.

brlewis 15y ago
See the penultimate paragraph of the article.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  Looks like that just reads Google+ data, but doesn't actually post anything back to it.
mirrorskin 15y ago
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 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.