Developers have been waiting since late June for Google to release their API to the public. Well, today is that Day. Just a few minutes ago Chris Chabot, from Google+ Developer Relations, announced that the Google+ API is now available to the public. The potential for this is huge, and will likely set Google+ on a more direct path towards social networking greatness. We should see an explosion of new applications and websites emerge in the Google+ community as developers innovate, and make useful tools from the available API. The Google+ API at present provides read-only access to public data posted on Google+ and most of the Google+ API follows a RESTful API design, which means that you must use standard HTTP techniques to get and manipulate resources.
Here is the full post Chris made about the Google+ API:
“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.
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.
Please follow the link to the blog post to find out what exactly we’re launching and you can find the technical details on how to use this on our new developer site at developers.google.com.
I’d also like to take a moment to introduce my team who will be joining me on working with our developer community (ie: you!) and answering any questions you may have about the Google+ platform on our discussion forums.
We’ll all also be doing a bunch of Hangouts over the next few days and beyond to talk to you directly and hear what you think of the +Platform as well as helping with any coding questions you may have, so make sure to add them to your Google+ developers circle!
+Timothy Jordan
+Jonathan Beri
+Ade Oshineye
+Will Norris
+Jenny Murphy
+Wolff DobsonNow let’s see lots of re-shares on this post & let’s get this party started!”
The full set of APIs can be found here. It will be very interesting to see how fast developers roll out new applications and websites which interact with the social network. There are already some amazing ideas out there which could create a large ecosystem of Google+ related sites. Having said this, remember that these APIs are for “read-only” of public data, meaning we won’t be getting and sophisticated developments just yet. It seems likely though that Google intends to add to the current bunch of APIs in the near future.