Google+ API Wishlist
While I was a very early adopter of Google+, today I’ve basically disabled my Twitter account and my Facebook account remains open only to manage a few advertising campaigns and applications. I’ve used Google+ as my primary social outlet since late June. Initially I started to write a scraper to deal with Google+ to fix a few things I didn’t like about it, but, Google did mention that an API was coming. Google+’s API contains read-only access to your account, but, surely needs improvement.
While Games do appear to have access to these APIs, releasing them to the general public so that they can create their own apps would be greatly appreciated. I understand the complexity of writing an API and getting it right the first time, I’d like to put forward a list of items that would be helpful.
Post to Stream
Circles/Public/People
Notification list. Perhaps the post circles contains a tuple that can
turn notification on for each of the circles or people. If Public is
passed a notification, ignore it silently. Alternatively, a second
list of notification targets.
Content of post
Attached media object(s) Picture URL, Gallery URL Link URL, Video tag/url.
Currently Google+ only supports a single attached object, but why not
plan for the future here. Options might include, preview thumbnail/fullsize
inserted into stream.
Email People not yet using Google+, default to false/no.
Get Circles
return a list of the circles that the user currently has
Get Members in Circles
return a list of the members in a circle. If no circle name passed, return
list of circles with members. Pagination if too large?
What would be nice for the Google+ API
Add Member to Circle
Add a member ID to a particular circle
Delete Member from Circle
Delete a member ID from a circle
Add Circle
Delete Circle
Personally, adding members to circles would greatly simplify the manual process behind http://plus.cd34.com/, but, I understand the obvious spam implications here.
With even the basic functionality listed above, even if we couldn’t attach objects, we could have our blogs post to Google+ or have our favorite desktop/webtop software post to Google+, making it one of the ‘Big Three’ rather than the duopoly the social media world currently has.
I would love to have the ability to post to Google+ from certain apps that I have running locally. I used to tweet IPv6 traffic tracker data of weekly statistics on email % received over IPv6, IPv6 traffic data volumes and other such data. I set up a small project that I thought was fun – replaying historic events synchronized to the actual event so that people could follow along. At present, there is no easy way to do this. Knowing what application published to the stream would also be very helpful – allowing developers to customize the ‘posted by’ line. When someone sees a post, they would know if it was automated or entered through the web client.
As a hobbyist, I’d love to see a slightly expanded API.
Tags: google