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Comment by epoxyhockey | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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