Getting the Google+ Feed for any profile in JSON | Hacker News Reader

Getting the Google+ Feed for any profile in JSON

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20 pointschime10 comments

Nice, I wrote a similar scraper in NodeJS, which also delivers profile information: https://github.com/fhemberger/googleplus-scraper/

Are you interested in contributing?

Think I'd rather wait until the API is released.

Interesting. Does the user need to be logged in to G+ and a friend of the person you are requesting the feed for? Otherwise its a bit of a privacy bug!

Edit: Reading it again, it clearly states public posts only.

A guy already did an RSS feed generator based on that JSON:

https://github.com/russellbeattie/plusfeed http://plusfeed.appspot.com/

This strikes me as a massive waste of time. I would expect Google to release their own native RSS/Atom feed functionality in the not too distant future.

Although this comment is being downvoted, I stand by it. Why would you spend time producing a third party addon which you know will almost certainly be obsoleted by a "native" version. This application has no future. Google will expose these feeds via RSS themselves.

Hardly "massive" - his code is a single file with 108 sloc.

It's not just the code base though obviously. It's the research time, the setting up of the repository, setting up of the hosting. And if you read the example feed (his own account), you find the following comment:

"Gah... spent a lot more time than I wanted to cleaning up the http://plusfeed.appspot.com feeds. GOOG will eventually just add them, I'm not sure why I went through the effort. Was interesting playing with Python I guess... and a little of Django too..."

Of cause, most Google+ tools will become obsolete by the time Google releases the official API. On the other hand, getting into it is a typical nerdy approach, that I love: Play around with the newest toys, see what can be done with them.

Personally, that's what drives me in this case: Learn something new, do some creative coding (without having to invest too much time like working on a 'real' project), provide something useful for those, who also already tamper with it, have fun. And maybe we stumble upon a useful idea, which can be extended, once the official API is out.

In my view, that makes it worth the effort.

He may have spent too much time, but it wasn't setting up the repository - two steps on Github and a copy-paste some shell commands - nor the hosting - creating a GAE project takes five minutes or so.

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