A Call for Google+ to Enable Posting via its API
blog.intigi.com
blog.intigi.com
"By updating its API to support posting, users of clients and plugins would start to actively publish to Google+. This would quickly increase the amount and quality of content available on this platform and in turn attract users and engagement."
No, it wouldn't. It would turn into Facebook, which right now is a stream of unreleated, unuseful junk. Why do I care if my friends on the other side of the state check into a bar? I don't. It's pointless, useless information.
What Facebook has built is a data dumping ground, songs listened to, bars checked into, and the always obnoxious comment from someone you know to someone you don't.
What G+ has tried to do, at least with games, is contextualize the notifications. If I'm playing a game, then I see the game notifications. They never appear in the main stream. I like this. I really hate the Spotify track notifications in Facebook, they're awful. I'm perfectly fine with seeing them in Spotify, because I've already made a decision to listen to music.
Facebook opened up the flood gates, and everyone is drowning. Google is taking the opposite approach, but everyone is thirsty. It seems a lot easier for Google to move towards more useful notifications than for Facebook to back away from them.
It's pointless and useless to you; you can hardly claim that it's pointless and useless to everyone. And this is exactly why I'll reiterate what I've said over and over again before... the solution is to give people better filters. You can't control what other people publish and trying to do so is pointless... but giving people filters to decide what to include/exclude in their streams it totally reasonable, and it's what Facebook, G+, and all the other "social" sites need to get better at.
The automated stuff is what everyone wants to filter, but there are apps where that could be a mix e.g. I want to explicitly share a song from Spotify vs. having them automatically do it.
The only way this would work is to have a dedicated section for posts from APIs, but that really defeats the purpose for using the API in the first place.
Stop thinking like an engineer and think like a non-technical common user.
Being a non-technical common user doesn't mean you don't need better filters; it means the service needs to make it easier for you to explain to it what you do and don't want to see. You don't even have to expose the word "filter" to the non-technical people, but the filters need to be there conceptually, nonetheless.
Note that I'm not saying this is easy... I'm saying this is the challenge that G+, Facebook, Twitter, etc. need to take on and solve. As opposed to the challenge of "how do we not let people post stuff." That's easy, and it's a cop-out.
Now, adding a large group of people to a Twitter list via web Twitter is such a painful exercise, I often turn to an API solution (tweetbe.at in particular) to do it.
First, there are countermeasures. As a user on Google+ I'd quickly remove someone from my circles if they over-shared low quality content. Furthermore, Google+ can implement algorithms that affect the prominence of the content based on various quality factors. There's evidence that Facebook has such algorithms in place (1).
Second, the headwinds to gain share in a market with strong network effects outweighs the risk of a flood of content. Users already have a preference to use Facebook and Twitter given their network value (2). Any friction in sharing via Google+ just further encourages users to invest the bulk of their time and resources on these other platforms.
(1) http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32124/Facebook-C...
(2) http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/28/google-plus-ghost-town/
The evidence indicates otherwise. Both Google Buzz & FriendFeed failed in part because of lack of engaged users. That in turn was caused by the floods of autoposted crap.
There is no network effect benefit from content being posted from non-engaged users. Rather, it is the opposite: in the case of both Buzz & FriendFeed people would use it as an interface for reading Twitter (say) and the would move over to Twitter to converse. The crossposted content acted as a way to encourage people to leave the platform.
Engagement is king on social networks. Anything that reduces engagement should be discouraged.
Yea, it seems logical : X is being annoying on G+, I'll take him off it, but then X starts yelling at you IRL and drama follows and you start using G+ less which Google doesn't like.
I know of small communities that are actually flourishing inside Google+.
Google thinks that they rather have a small amount of original content rather that an abundance of auto-posts from other social networks.
...which don't work in most cases that I've seen.
Second, the headwinds to gain share in a market with strong network effects outweighs the risk of a flood of content.
You're assuming that gaining share is more important than creating quality content. This is not an assumption shared by Vic Gundrota, nor I.
Honestly, and I don't mean to be rude, you sound a bit too much like some marketing wonk that someone who actually cares about the product. As many users at whatever the cost to the product quality is just not a winning long-term strategy, and Google always plays long-term.
In contrast, Google+ is almost completely signal for me right now.
Now, if one could separate off each user from their bots... that would be neat. Maybe default to only circling a user, but show that they have some bots which one can also subscribe to, if one wants.
How do people know what g+ users are "desperately eager for"?
Have there been studies? Polls?
Nobody does, but - again - we're talking about throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Not everything posted via API is "junk."
True, but enough of it is to make it a problem. What could Google do to trap the noise but allow the signal? Rate limiting? Pattern matching against Twitter posts?
https://plus.google.com/107158560758466172135/posts
Charlie Kindel uses a backdoor to paste his tweets to G+ and adds very little to the community. There is no interaction on his posts - it's just added noise.
Fine, then the people who find it to be noise can un-circle him. For the class of people who are largely interested in the same topics as Charlie, it isn't even noise in the first place. Honestly, I don't see this as much of an argument against allowing the Write API.
Like he apparently had some original ideas about the naming of Windows RT, represented in 4 posts each ~100 characters long (one of which seemed to be an "end of split post" marker). It looked the worst of both worlds. And argument so abbreviated it had been reduced to gibberish, but looking very verbose due to having been artificially split.
I couldn't turn it off if I wanted to (and I don't; I have no desire to "engage" on G+, but the narcissist in me likes knowing as many people are seeing my posts as possible).
I turned it on as an experiment to see how the people who have "circled me" on G+ would react.
The reaction has been mixed. On one hand VicG used it as an example of what not to do. A few others have made snide comments.
On the other hand, I've picked up hundreds of new circlers and gotten some interesting (to me) comments on some of my posts/tweets.
And there is a best argument against adding a write API to Google+
However, I would like to see them improve their API by supporting some realtime notifications like PubSubHubBub (for stream items and comments).
For purely selfish reasons, I'd like to see them consider allowing write access to comments.
If you're interested in adding your vote to allowing write access, join the others here http://code.google.com/p/google-plus-platform/issues/detail?...
It's the longer & more difficult way and I applaud them for it.
If they open up a WRITE API right away, it's going to be exactly like Google Buzz.
I had an idea very early on in G+'s life that it'd work great as a sort of bookmarking tool (nb: for myself, not necessarily others). I wanted to create an extension that I could use to "post" articles to circles I created (e.g. tech, or food or whatever) when I came across an interesting article.
I've tried other bookmarking services in the past, but never had the discipline to keep going (or I forgot). I figured because I use gmail frequently, and am always logged in, it would work well as a place I could aggregate things I wanted to read, but didn't have time to read at the time. It would also have the added benefit of being a list, or collection of things I found interesting/relevant that I could then share with other people. Could even have communal bookmarking with my closest friends.
Alas, I haven't opened G+ in months.
For sites that don't implement a +1 button, there are browser extensions (at least for Chrome) that will do it for you.
Can you designate a circle to send to?
You end up with streams of auto-posted Twitter junk.
Maybe at some point in the future they will develop algorithms that filter out this stuff to the point where it is useful. At the moment I prefer it the way it is.
On a side note, I kind of like what G+ was thinking with the Circles concept as a way of filtering but I don't really like it in practice... or maybe it was just how my friends were using it. Most of the people I know on G+ created Circles and used them like you might use tags in a blog post. A post from a Mac person about a cool photo app or feature they found in the latest iOS might be visible only to people in their "Mac-heads", "Photog" and "iOS" circles. I'm not a Photog or a Mac/iOS person but still might be interested in content of that nature. I can understand having Circles like "Coworkers" and "Bible Study Group" where there might be discussions that should be kept private. But using Circles like tagging seems excessively exclusionary when it is not done for privacy reason. While I appreciate the sentiment of people not wanting to bore me with stuff I may not be interested in, I think it made the "share ALL the things" pendulum swing too far the other way. (just my opinion)
Similarly, there are plenty of people that I want to follow because of their insight in one area, but I don't want to see their lolcats.
Circles: I don't think you want to see my lolcats so I'll just deny you access to see them.
Filters: I don't want to see your lolcats so I'll just hide them from my stream.
As a consumer of my stream, I would like to have as much control over it as I can. Circles gives me almost no control over what I see. Since we don't know what Circles we've been put in and we don't see content for Circles we're not in, we really have no idea what we've missed.
It's a nice break from FB and Twitter...if I was running g+ I wouldn't enable write access at all, make a niche on the fact that everything is organic.
Automation comes with marketers and spammers, and I want them off my feeds for good to be honest.
I'm with Google here. Allowing people to use the API and cross-post might get them short term wins but will cause long term harm; they will be commoditizing themselves and worse, not giving themselves the chance to build an organic community.
The uses that come to mind are the convenience of posting from a multi-network client (e.g. TweetDeck), cross-posting from other networks and for those "RSS/new blog post to network" type scripts. In my opinion, the latter two are the robotic posts that can bog down G+ and the third isn't too far from that.