What really struck home for me was Steve's line, "I hate... plussing" because I actually think his entries like this one are a great niche for Google Plus -- it's basically a built-in blogging platform/RSS reader. Facebook and Twitter are pretty bad platforms for posting 5 paragraphs (or 25 paragraphs, in Steve's case) worth of thoughts, but Google Plus works pretty well. It has all the sharing/social goodness of those platforms without the overhead of having to create your own blog and tell people about it.
So I thought about a web application that would basically provide a wrapper to post blog-esque entries on Google Plus, and sure enough I looked up the API, and like Steve, you pretty much just get the Stalker Method[0]. Not a POST method to be found.
Then it made me recall an earlier life where I worked on an SEM optimization platform, and the most common thing we heard from our Google Rep was, "oh, um, yeah, doing that is not available in our API."
Short of a directive from Larry and Sergey and the willingness to follow through for the 3-5 years it took Amazon to reap dividends, is there anything Google can do?
You too, huh? That's what I do now. Our company's been a paying user of Google's APIs for a couple years, and it's been a nightmare the whole time: Inadequate features, bogus data, weird malfunctions, etc.
Which API? Not that I think Google's APIs are all brilliant, but on the whole, I curse them much less than I do some other companies' APIs (like Facebook and just about anything by Yahoo).
But then again, the quality of their APIs varies pretty wildly from product to product.
So I thought about a web application that would basically provide a wrapper to post blog-esque entries on Google Plus, and sure enough I looked up the API, and like Steve, you pretty much just get the Stalker Method[0]. Not a POST method to be found.
Then it made me recall an earlier life where I worked on an SEM optimization platform, and the most common thing we heard from our Google Rep was, "oh, um, yeah, doing that is not available in our API."
Short of a directive from Larry and Sergey and the willingness to follow through for the 3-5 years it took Amazon to reap dividends, is there anything Google can do?
[0] https://developers.google.com/+/api/