Questions about Google’s new social network real name policies aside, I quite like Google+. One of the things I like about it, in stark contrast to Facebook, is that Google+ lets you access and back-up your personal data. Now Google has taken it one step further: The company has opened up some of Google+’s Application Programming Interfaces.
On Google+, appropriately enough, Chris Chabot, a Google developer advocate, announced “I’m super excited about how the Google+ project brings the richness and nuance of real life sharing to software, and today we’re announcing our first step towards bringing this to your apps as well by launching the Google+ public data APIs.”
Chabot continued, “These APIs allow you to retrieve the public profile information and public posts of the Google+ users, and they lay the foundation for us to build on together – Nothing great is ever built in a vacuum so I’m excited to start the conversation about what the Google+ platform should look like.”
So excitement aside, what’s the story with these APIs? A quick look at the Google+ Developers site reveals that we’re still in the early stages here. The sites states that “This initial set [of APIs] is focused on providing read access to public data. We’ll be adding more APIs over time to build on this foundation and help you create more types of integrations”