The Google+ API Is Released 154
An anonymous reader writes "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."
Read only (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't wait to see all the interesting ideas developers have for using this read only API.
Re:Read only (Score:4, Insightful)
It is kind of lame. All you can do is read what's on someone's page. This will make screen-scraping easier.
Interestingly, it's all JSON. XML seems to be on the way out for API interfaces.
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Coincidentally, at my company we decided on a (gradual) move from XML to JSON yesterday. (We've discussed it a number of times, but this time we finally made the choice.)
JSON (Score:5, Interesting)
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XML is awful. Especially for human-readable formatting.
XML isn't intended for human-readable formatting.
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XML is intended for an almost always used for human-readable formatting. Whether it's config files, webservices, or whatever else, you still have humans coding for it and debugging it. XML is a nightmare and needs to be put out of our misery.
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The only advantage that XML has over JSON is type-safety, basically. You can define the structure of really complex XML in excruciating detail. JSON is much looser. But all the DTDs and XSDs only annoyed people and took up time, and in these days of dynamic typing, nobody really cares much about that stuff. JSON is quick and lightweight, and when something is missing, you're going to notice anyway.
XML sounded good in the days of binary formats, but mostly it was a valuable lesson that led to JSON.
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>JSON is quick and lightweight, and when something is missing, you're going to notice anyway.
Sure, why bother to make sure anything matches the documentation. Or the function parameters. If it breaks you can just use Firebug to fix the data and press resume to get back to your FB page, right?
What? (Score:1)
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His avatar is a unicorn, so yeah, I guess so.
Too little, too late? (Score:1)
Until they reverse their stance on real names, sadly I have no f*cks to give.
Re:Too little, too late? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're not going to use the word "fuck" in plaintext when you're pseudonymized, then why the fuck do you care if you use your real name or not?
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Okay. I just realized the irony. Let's see if anyone else does.
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Okay. I just realized the irony. Let's see if anyone else does.
Took you long enough. :-)
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Never used a pseudonym on Google+. My issue was never about *me* being able to use one.
So I did the next best thing - I've deleted my Google Profile and have moved on.
Thought I'd never say this, but Bing's search isn't all that bad! (j/k, j/k)
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Same here. I stopped sending out invites, and gave up using G+. With the real names policy only a portion of the people I know will be prepared to switch, not making it worth my while to badger and cajole people into switching from Facebook. G+ is pretty much dead in the water. But people still hate Facebook so there is still room for a new competitor!
Phillip.
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I wish Diaspora* would change their fucking name so it'd be more appealing to the masses.
Also wishing I had donated my $100 to Michael Chisari and The Appleseed Project over Diaspora* but I didn't know about Appleseed until after I had donated to Diaspora. ::sigh::
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Send me your Email. I've got invites.
gellenburg (gmail).
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no need to wait:
https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Community-supported-pods [github.com]
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I wish Diaspora* would change their fucking name so it'd be more appealing to the masses.
What? The name is the coolest part of it! If only the rest of it was anywhere near as good, it might amount to something.
Good (Score:2)
Now maybe there will be something interesting to use Google+ for...
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You'd think a few games might help, but considering that one of the prime draws of Facebook games is that they reward social behavior (i.e. getting your friends involved) they also reward fake social behavor exploits (i.e. making up lots of fake accounts to pretend you have more friends and get more points).
Google+ sorta forbids that cloning aspect of social gaming. But maybe a nice port of Tetris or FreeCell would get them some dwell time...
G+ games (Score:4, Interesting)
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No no. You're missing it. Facebook thinks it's about spamming your friends. But Facebook users have made it about building fake friends to game the games.
Which has actually made Facebook more popular, because it's not all about spamming your friends.
I'd estimate half of Facebook's "users" are fake accounts used to stat-up gameplay.
Tetris clones (Score:2)
Google+ sorta forbids that cloning aspect of social gaming. But maybe a nice port of Tetris or FreeCell would get them some dwell time
Guess who else tries to forbid cloning: The Tetris Company.
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So does Facebook
Facebook only allows one account per person.
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Facebook only allows one account per person.
Yeah, but they don't really do much in order to enforce that. And they are right about that - someone making an account for his dog may be pointless, but it's harmless, too.
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My friend (actual friend; I personally have no clones) has accounts for her dead father, her three dogs, several of her birds, and a potholder. At least it looks like a potholder in the picture. And several that are just her, with her own name anagrammed or otherwise manipulated, and photos of her at various ages and in various costumes.
She may have more than 30, total.
And from what I've seen, there's no way she's in the top half of the cloning histogram.
What Facebook has written rules for, and what faceb
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Your twitter stream is about to come with embedded commercial tweets, too.
Cool. Just in time for Google to EOL Google+ (Score:4, Insightful)
Google+ didn't bring the gamechange.
It's a ghost town.
You can see Linus Torvalds and the Google Twins there, but hardly anyone else ever posts. And they don't much either. Linus' last post is 9/6, and Sergey's is 8/28, and Larry's is 8/13...
Google needed more than a convention hall. It needed to emcee the convention. Now we have an API, and maybe some people to P it, nobody to A it.
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Just because they don't post to you doesn't mean they don't post. I have hundreds of posts, but each one of them is private so my public profile looks empty. I don't know anyone who makes public posts. That's kind of the entire point, which you appear to have missed.
public posts (Score:2)
I don't know anyone who makes public posts. That's kind of the entire point, which you appear to have missed
There are many I've found who use G+ as they use Twitter, IOW all public posts, like a broadcasting station/soapbox. I find what you say to be generally true of most other users though (including myself). I post daily but you wouldn't know it from my profile.
Blogger (Score:2)
There are many I've found who use G+ as they use Twitter, IOW all public posts, like a broadcasting station/soapbox.
And there are many who use Google's other soapbox service [blogger.com], especially because unlike Google+, Blogger is open to the public.
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The media hype made it seem more important than it really was. Same happened with Wave.
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And ChromeOS.
"GOOGLE IS GOING TO TAKE ON MICROSOFT WITH ITS OWN OPERATING SYSTEM!!!"
Yes, mainstream media, Google has figured out a way to make a computer that only has a web browser. Look out Microsoft, your days are numbered. You cannot possibly hope to compete with Google's operating system which does not give the ability to write code for it.
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"GOOGLE IS GOING TO TAKE ON MICROSOFT WITH ITS OWN OPERATING SYSTEM!!!"
And they did.
And it was a stupid fucking idea and it failed faster than Windows Phone 7.
But they did try.
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John Scalzi praised it highly, and I was interested, right up until the fine print swam into view.
IMO, the killer was the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned "Real Name" requirement. I have a google account I use for my Reader, Mail, Calendar, and Docs/Notepad the last three of which are also synchronized on my phone for mobile access. There was and is simply NO way in hell I would risk losing those under google's draconian "Right name or die!" policy, and I rather suspect an awful lot of people just walked awa
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How blissful it must be to be so ignorant that you think the policy that effects one part of the company doesn't effect the rest of the company.
All Google online services have a real name policy moron, they just haven't bothered to really enforce it on a large scale ... but if you just search slashdot you'll find at least one story of someone who lost Android apps for that very reason.
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I'm in that group as well. I hate Facebook, and have disliked every other major social networking site. I do like Google+, and even people think it's a Ghost Town, it's because of where they are looking. I see plenty of activity.
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The July 28th blog post on betashop.com tells a bit of a different story. ( link to Google cache, the regular site seems to be off atm. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Kro0IOBNR3IJ:betashop.com/page/2+site:betashop.com+betashop+google+plus&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us [googleusercontent.com] - It's toward the bottom below the "Make the logo smaller" t-shirt)
It was (at the time) their single highest traffic day and 5% of that traffic came from Google+. That's nearly 9000 visits in one day to a site
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The public wants an alternative to Facebook. Google+, as especially revealed by their "real names" policy is trying to be Facebook. G+ just is not filling any need of those who are unhappy with Facebook, let alone those who are happy.
"Real Names" policy (Score:3)
I don't want to mix my real life info like my name, and professional experience, with stuff I would not want a future employer to see. Hence the need to compartmentalize the data under different account names. Since Google+ does not allow that, I'm not interested in using it much.
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Anyway, I see facebook making changes in response to the competition. Not fixing all gripes with it of course, but changes are being made to the... er... "game" as it were.
(By the way, let's not start u
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Facebook wasn't Google. Everyone was on MySapce. Nobody really knew Facebook existed for a couple of years.
Google+ is Facebook++, and Google wallpapered the world with announcing it was open.
Okay, it was open. It was also void of elemental human interaction, and the forced-looking posting on it isn't creating a critical mass.
The API might help. If they can get some dwellers into some applets. Then people will go there to be, not just to see if it's woke up yet.
Add a game, and it might gamechange the cyb
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Look, you can't really compare the timelines between Facebook and Google+. Facebook has been around for almost a decade, and when it came out it didn't have many competitors, the whole social networking concept was new and experimental. Now Facebook is the established brand in social networking - pretty much invented the market - and it's going to be incredibly difficult for Google to topple it, even if the numbers show it to be oh so much more successful in the short term than Facebook was when it started.
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If Google want to build a better social networking site, maybe they should spend less on marketing, throw together lots of alternative sites, and see what sticks on the wall (pun intended). It's not like they can't afford it.
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How does
it didn't have many competitors
translate to
No competitors?
Yes, MySpace was a competitor but it was a much smaller market back then and Facebook did it better, so there wasn't too big of a barrier to switching. Now, if people switch completely, they have to take the hundreds of photos they've posted, and lose years of status updates, and wait for all their hundreds of friends to switch over as well - it's a big task just like reformatting your harddrive which is something that most people are also loathe to do even when it would end up being bet
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You are following the wrong people. I follow people on G+ that post like 10+ times daily. If anything they post TOO much.
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You know, for me it's the other way around, I can hardly keep up with my friends posting on G+, while almost everybody (including myself) has largely abandoned Facebook.
And you know something else? The plural of anecdote isn't data. Our experiences differ a lot, still the truth will be somewhere in between.
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Not a very big API (Score:1)
Well its a start (Score:2)
The trick with Write is the authentication. Now google has to figure out how to do an authentication scheme it likes (read "they developed to take over the web") for that to happen.
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Google already has an authentication scheme across all their products.
They implement OpenID and OAuth for all google accounts.
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Google APIs generally use Authsub (A google invented protocol), or the combination of OpenId and OpenAuth, possibly using the Hybrid Protocol [googlecode.com],
I'd be excited about this... (Score:3)
...if they ever got around to fixing google apps so it worked with google+. Instead, all we ( us google apps users ) get are false promises...when we get anything at all.
Can anyone recommend a decent competitor to Google Apps?
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Don't throw a rotten tomato at me, but Office 365 is pretty good, especially its SharePoint feature.
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While I have OSS leanings, I'm more interested in getting the job done rather than making any ideological stands. 365 is interesting, I'll have to take a look at it.
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This. I could probably convince a number of friends and family to check it out but they don't want to sign up for a gmail.com specific account when they already have Google Apps accounts. If they added profiles to Google Apps accounts (or whatever is holding this back) and API features so I can cross-post (a la the Twitter app on Facebook) then I'd be set. The mobile app for G+ is light years better than Facebook's, and I especially like the "nearby" stream and the instant upload features. But as it is
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Not exactly. It's the fact that they seem completely unable to act professionally by giving status updates and accurate timelines. It doesn't speak highly of their continued interest in my business. I'd rather have my email hosted by a company that seems genuinely concerned with keeping the customer happy. Obviously that's not google. Which makes sense, when you think about it. Despite the fact I'm paying them, I'm the product not the customer. Their customers are the folks forking over the bills for
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You do not want Google+ if you have paid-for Google Apps. According to their ToS, if they think you might have posted something objectionable, they'll shitcan your account, and maybe you can complain to a Google customer service robot about it.
I have only a free Google account, but I've stopped posting to Google+. I have a free Gmail I do
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According to their ToS, if they think you might have posted something objectionable, they'll shitcan your account, and maybe you can complain to a Google customer service robot about it.
Which is ... exactly ... the same ... as all other Google services, like sharing your Docs or Spreadsheets.
Facebook doesn't behave that way and even if they did,
Funny how you can completely ignore all the shit that facebook does but you bitch about the same rules applying to Google. You're just too ignorant to realize they are pretty much the exact same as far as ToS goes, and that Google ToSes are ALL pretty much identical. Someone else bothered to read the Google+ ToS and told you about it, which is the only reason you have anything against Google+. You'
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Can anyone recommend a decent competitor to Google Apps?
I haven't really examined it, but Zoho is the service I usually hear in the context of Google Apps Competitor.
gWorld... (Score:2)
The piecemeal "lab" releases that were functional but only 75-85% complete were okay 10 years ago. Anymore, they just give the appearance of not really giving a crap. Overlay that with an Apple-esque approach to usability and terms of use and it just becomes gWorld over and over again.
quotas (Score:1)
The first thing that struck me is that quota limits are placed on all applications
"Applications are limited to a courtesy usage quota"
this will suck for anyone who wants to create an application intended for many users.
I tried , i really did... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mmmm... Yes. Facebook is definitely the service for you're looking for. <Jedi hand wave> There is no Google+.
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Declaring G+ dead already, really? How hard is it to use both G+ and Facebook, why would you have to "switch"? Facebook and Twitter are already conjoined in the way most people talk about them. And how many other social networks are you using simultaneously? A hell of a lot of them. Let's see?
Your e-mail address book.
IM (probably gchat and AIM, if not also MSN and Yahoo).
Skype.
Steam, Bnet, Xbox Live, PSN. Eventually Nintendo might make a serious online platform and you'll add WiiNet to the list.
Foursq
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All I'm doing on G+ is just reacting to others now. I went back to posting stuff on FB and occasionally to my own blog (when I have something to say that I think more than two people might want to hear about it.) And I'm not recommending G+ to anyone any more.
Still doing better than Diaspora, though, which is so pathetic it has to send out "we're still here" email...
Google+ failed because... (Score:2)
Nearly everyone I know that uses Facebook hates using Facebook. So the market was ready for invasion. Hell, people are leaving Facebook in significant numbers and that's with no alternative site to go to!!! Even normal people (you know what I mean) hate Facebook!
Our efforts to promote it didn't work; Google+ has failed.
The reason? Well, there are two:
1. Google+ is a really, really, really, *really* terrible brand-name. Idiots. How does 'Google+' say 'Social Network'? In any way? For the love of God
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I completely agree on the Google+ name, and their weird attempt to push "+1" as a substitute for "like".
Interface design however, I can't agree on. They may not be up to Apple's standards, but they're generally head and shoulders above the rest of their competitors. Google+ is still new and growing, and the interface can and will change easily as they experiment and look at feedback and usability. On the other hand, fixing the poor name and +1 will be harder the longer the wait.
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I completely agree on the Google+ name, and their weird attempt to push "+1" as a substitute for "like".
Mod parent +1 Insightful ;-)
Interface design however, I can't agree on. They may not be up to Apple's standards, but they're generally head and shoulders above the rest of their competitors. Google+ is still new and growing, and the interface can and will change easily as they experiment and look at feedback and usability. On the other hand, fixing the poor name and +1 will be harder the longer the wait.
The thing I like best about the Google+ interface is that the privacy controls are integrated into posting better. The ability to decide which circles should see a post is very clear, whereas with Facebook, I think they have the ability to do that, but it is not as obvious (plus I would have to organise everyone into catagories all at once; with Google+ I can do it as I add people as it was a feature from the start).
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Only half of an API (Score:2, Redundant)
When I first heard about this, I was excited. I can post to Twitter and Facebook (if I used the latter) using Seesmic Desktop, but can't post to Google+ unless I go to their website. This is because Seesmic (and other 3rd party clients) didn't have an API to access the site. Unfortunately, when I looked at the API, it's read-only. So Seesmic could show you comments on your stream, but to post an update or comment, you'd still have to go to their site. Perhaps the read-and-write API will come soon, but
Yahoo+ (Score:2)
I'm holding out this idealogical hope that when Google+ comes out of beta they'll announce that, "oh, by the way, it's federated, and here's Lars on his Yahoo+ account, and this is me adding him as a friend on my Google+"
Boom
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To little, too late (Score:2)
At this point, I'm about to give up and reactivate my Facebook account. I just don't think Google is agile enough to run an evolving so
That's cool but... (Score:2)
That's cool, but until they fix their stupid "real names only" policy, I'm not touching Google+
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But parent has a point. For most APIs a key makes sense, because they're the only way an application can access certain actions, but for a read only API like this where all the data can be scraped anyway, blocking an application doesn't buy you much.
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but for a read only API like this where all the data can be scraped anyway
Spider to the point where an API key would break, and Google will start serving CAPTCHAs.
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If ad viewers are sending id+preferences to your competitors instead of to you, then social isn't done. There is always pressing need for another, if you're the "another."
Don't view social networking as just another application. If it were just another application, then all these fucking web companies wouldn't be doing it; it w
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ah balls wrong story. lol
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Then why are you trying to combine them with one account?
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Unsure why this is also marked down this week, what's going on?
I don't want to have to make a new account, I simply want some of the facebook privacy features (amazingly) which google isn't offering.
I DON'T want to be found by my email address if I so choose.
I DO want to sign in with my normal google account.
I DON'T want to display my real name to some people.
I DON'T want to display my "internet alias's" to others
I DO want to lock my profile down to unknowns (or parts of it)
To replace / add to twitter, I DO
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Dyson never built anything at all in a vacuum. Fiction doesn't count, sorry. This is the real world were in now, try to keep up.
NASA never built anything great in a vacuum, though they have assembled a space station or two, which were built on Earth.
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here, have invites, I don't need 'em:
https://plus.google.com/i/upkIlH-ikcw:lVUWSKUAc30 [google.com]
if you use your account for anything but slagging off google+ and facebook I'll have a sad though :/