Will Google+ Ever Get A Full Read/Write API? | Hacker News Reader

Will Google+ Ever Get A Full Read/Write API?

techcrunch.com

64 pointsiProject27 comments

Google has indicated that writing will be provided through a history api: https://developers.google.com/+/history/

History sources can be set to default to public, and will show up on a user's profile when that happens (like +1's do today) - but they won't show up in other peoples feeds unless the user explicitly shares the moment within G+.

I think it's wiser to open up slower rather than being fully open, and then be forced to do what Twitter is doing for the stability / integrity of the network. And preventing noise and low quality content just makes sense. The quality of posts I see on Facebook has been slowly diminishing over the years - even with their "improved" algorithms, even when I've unsubscribed from a lot of people who just post uninteresting things - and especially after they have started to try monetizing the feed.

Except that by the time they open up no one will be around to actually take advantage of it. Every time I log into Google+ it's a ghost town.

EVERY SINGLE TIME I see Google + mentioned, I see some user who says "every time I log in it's a ghost town." Which is funny, because when I log in I see a constant stream of activity. Google+ isn't Facebook, so it won't act like Facebook. When someone you don't really care about sends you a friend request on FB, you accept it so you don't offend them, and then you are stuck looking at their crap in your feed. Google+ has one way relationships enabled by default, so you will only see activity if you explicity follow people. I like that, because I'm sick of seeing instagram pictures of people's food.

I don't know when you last used Facebook, or maybe it is your lack of use that is the problem, but it filters the feed to only show you stories from people you interact with. It basically implements Google+ circles completely automatically for you. You may have accidentally turned this off, I suppose. There's an option for the feed to give everything sorted by date instead, although it isn't the default.

It's a use thing.

I'm following the majority of my family and friends on google plus (yes, wow, they all have accounts) and not following any of the I'm-using-this-as-a-blog accounts like hacker news, google developers, etc.

When I login, what do I see?

"Nov 15, 2012 - Shared from +1 - Public"

The previous one?

"Oct 12, 2012 - Google Mail - Public"

So I mean, it's not like no one is using it at all, but no one I care about updates from is using it.

G+ is long-form Twitter with a few mods. There are definitely people on it that would interest you, but they won't come to you.

Family-and-friends are on FB already, so using G+ for the same thing will be disappointing for years unless you have a very active set of friends. I keep FB private, G+ public. I have a few Twitter accounts for different apps, but I mostly consume lightly.

If you don't know where to start, you might try the Hacker News Google+ community.

Here's the link

https://plus.google.com/communities/104388679763490357266

Look at me! I'm a ghost! Oooooooooh.

It's been 1.5 years. How much slower can they get, especially with being so far behind the curve in launch time?

The write API is necessary for blogs to auto-post new articles to G+. Auto-posting blog entries are standard operating procedure for Facebook and Twitter and greatly assist in seeding social networks with content (which users can then comment on and like/+1/favorite).

They way I see it is that G+ is either going for something special in that they would rather see it a ghost town with no spam, than have to deal with lots of content and combat some spam.

I personally love the G+ system, but there is no way that I am going to manually post a blog article to a G+ page every time I publish something.

Remember what happened with Google Buzz? It's pretty much a mirror of a user's Twitter/Facebook stream.

My Google+ network doesn't have much activity relative to Twitter/FB but I still visit it once a day because the content is mostly unique, not the same ones I see on my Facebook and Twitter streams.

Good points. I visit more or less daily too; for me it's more about the quality of the content than the uniqueness, since there's little overlap between who I follow on each. I only visit Facebook maybe once a week and Twitter once a month or so.

For me, G+ is where I post things I find interesting, usually links and thoughts to a relatively limited audience of real-life friends and acquaintances, and sometimes tech-related thoughts to my Hackers circle.

At this point I only use FB for a) chatting with people whose phone number / email address I don't have, and b) to keep in touch with and get updates from more distant family/friends (e.g. "that waitress I worked with a few years ago got engaged-- best wishes!", "it's my buddy's college roommate's birthday-- let's go get a beer in Portland sometime this summer!")

And I only use Twitter to read jokes from wannabe comedians and publicly bitch about corporations...

I would prefer not to see every single blog post from every single person I follow. I'd much rather see blog posts organically, by following people who find interesting things and then seeing the things those people found interesting enough to manually post.

Basically, I don't want to get a link from the author to her own post, I'd rather get a link from someone who read her post or article and found it interesting. I realize it doesn't involve a sexy machine learning algorithm, but it sure does work well for me.

FYI, it took Facebook 2.5 years to release the first version of their API.

When you want to compete in the marketplace you don't get to re-do your competitors time-frame when they rolled out. You get to play by the rules of today.

So whether it took Facebook an hour, a decade or 2.5 years to roll out their API, right now they've got one and right now google is trying to compete with Facebook through their g+ offering.

Why not? Why are they rushed? They're trying to displace a competitor who was first to market. It's not going to work the same way, so quickly rushing out to make an API isn't an automatic assumption to be made relating to if it will help you be successful. Keeping higher quality content in G+ seems to be their current goal - whether that means there's currently less content overall initially, I imagine they're quite aware of their overall analytics.

Keeping higher quality content in G+ seems to be their current goal

That must be why ads for G+ are never ever about sharing little silly things with your friends... no wait, they're actually trying their hardest. It's just adoption sucks, so people rationalize it. That's how I see it, anyway.

It's not at all clear that having exactly the same content on G+ as on Facebook is a winning strategy for Google.

The twitter-clones tried this approach, encouraging content-"seeding" with a full r/w API. What actually happened is that they (nearly?) all ended up as networks full of bots spamming each other with duplicate content.

And it's hard to sell advertising when your only users are robots.

It'll get that about a week after they fix those silly urls.

21 digits should be enough for anyone. At least they won't run out of them in the foreseeable future.

They plan on being an active service past the singularity and perfect AI.

Google has never really struck me as a company that has "clean urls" in it's corporate tradition. The worst offender is probably Google Maps.. I have no idea why they insist on making their own url shortener for those clusterfucks of permalinks available only through a "lab".

Suppose Google rightly keeps API closed until the problem of maintaining acceptable signal/noise level in social networks is resolved. My twitter/FB stream is full of garbage (G+ is more or less OK). Not because of wrong people I'm subscribed to, but because of lack of proper filtering tools.

Openness seems to be a guiding principle for Google. It seems inconceivable that they want to keep it closed to the web forever, so we can probably take their statements about protecting it until they understand how to protect it's unique attributes at face value.

Google has an awful history with regards to communication with developers and communication with customers (read: very few public APIs and terrible customer service).

And they tend to shut down their APIs (or even whole projects) just when you start to think they're going to be reliable this time around.

So why do you think then that they should offer a Write API? Shouldn't they put a lot of thought on their API offering so it won't be shut down in the future?

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