Google has unveiled the first developer application programming interfaces for Google+, the company’s new social network.
The launch is the first step toward developers creating Google+ apps and integrating the social network into existing apps.
“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 toward bringing this to your apps as well by launching the Google+ public data APIs,” Google Developer Advocate Chris Chabot said in a Google+ post.
Google made it clear that Thursday’s API release was focused on public data only — they can only retrieve public posts and public profile data.
As developer Mohamed Mansour notes on Google+, there are not a lot of APIs in this release. Mansour says that Google+’s first APIs only allow for querying of a single person or an activity/action on Google+. This could lead to simple apps that show off a user’s public Google+ stream, but these APIs wouldn’t allow TweetDeck or Hootsuite to support posting to Google+.
According to one recent report, developers are excited by the prospects of Google+. Two-thirds of developers believe that Google+ has the potential to challenge or catch up with Facebook. And it will certainly need the support of developers to compete, especially as its rapid growth begins to wane.
Still, the release is a major milestone in the growth of the toddler social network, which was released less than three months ago. Google+ has a long way to go to unseat Facebook as the king of social networking.
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