Developers rejoice! Google is slowly, but surely, opening up the Google+ APIs to developers. The start, as the official blogpost says, has been done with allowing access to APIs that are read-only and are related to posts that are shared publicly on Google+.
Chris Chabot of Google+ Developer Relations said in the post, “I’m super excited about how the Google+ project brings the richness and nuances of life sharing to software, and, today, we are announcing our first step towards bringing this to your apps as well by launching the Google+ public data APIs.
Saying that nothing is ever built in a vacuum, Chabot said that the opened up APIs will allow developers to retrieve public profile information and public posts of Google+ users. This implies that, as of now, there won’t be any way to share posts on Google+ using a third-party service. Yet, we could start to see Google+ posts appearing outside of the Google+ platform, may be in a user’s social media management client or on other social networking services.
In addition to the current access allowed to public data, the blogpost says that over time Google will be adding more APIs to enable developers to create more types of integrations.
Google says that the initial release is intended for feedback and learning. They hope that it will provide enough access for developers to check out the APIs and start integrating Google+ with their apps.
Chabot said that when developers access the publicly available date, it is sent to them in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) encoded format. “Our API methods are RESTful (Reprsentational State Transfer) HTTP requests which return JSON responses, and, our payload formats use standard syntax for people info or activities,” he said.
He continued, “Since, we are starting with public data only, you simply need to register your app before making requests. Since the app is being installed for the first time, developers may find that they are not sure as to which Google+ user is running their app. In such cases, they can use the new plus.me OAuth2, to ask users who they are. OAuth2 is a security protocol that enables users to grant third-party access to their Web resources without sharing their passwords.
The Google APIs Client Libraries are available as betas for .Net, Java, PHP and Python. Enterprising developers, please note, the APIs Client Libraries are also available as alpha code for the Google Web Toolkit, Objective C and Ruby.
Chabot requests developers to ensure that the applications developed on the Google+ platform adhere to the following three guidelines: Put the user first, be transparent and respect user data.
Many are of the view that most of the developers are waiting for access to APIs of Google+ Circles, which would enable them to create more interesting third-party apps. However, Google+ Circles would involve complex connections and tricky privacy issues.
For more information about the Google+ platform and APIs to public data, developers can go to developers.google.com/+