Today Google launched the beginnings of an API for the company’s Google+ social network.
APIs allow outside developers to connect with and build applications on top of web services like Facebook, Twitter and now Google+. In fact much of the success of Twitter and Facebook is a result of both services’ developer APIs. If Google+ is to have any hope of catching its competitors it needs a strong API.
Unfortunately what Google has unveiled so far isn’t much of an API. The current version of the Google+ API limits developers to read-only access of public posts. If you were hoping to see apps that tracked your circles or allowed you to post from a desktop app the new API will leave you wanting.
As it stands, the Google+ API is little more than an easier, officially-sanctioned way to screen scrape public Google+ posts.
Google is aware of the APIs shortcomings, calling it a “first step,” and plans to expand the Google+ API in the future. Presumably the first order of business will be adding write-access so that outside apps can interact with Google+ rather than simply consuming Google+ posts.
Of course if you’ve been trying to add Google+ support to your app without these APIs, you can throw away your HTML parsers and enjoy RESTful methods that return JSON to a properly authenticated app (the authentication is handled by OAuth 2). Google has also released a set of client libraries for Python, Ruby, PHP and other popular languages.
It’s limited at the moment, but if you’d like to get started now, so you know what’s going on when the full-featured version arrives, head on over to the Google+ Platform Blog which has a short tutorial and plenty of sample code to get you rolling.
Microsoft has announced it will expand its effort to bring Facebook into Bing’s search results, displaying new annotations alongside any search result links your Facebook friends have liked. Bing first began integrating Facebook “likes” into its search results back in October 2010, but results from your friends were relegated to the bottom of the page. The new version promotes your friends up into the main search results listing.
Microsoft’s Bing offering is roughly the same thing with one huge difference — Bing includes results from Facebook, Google does not.
That’s a huge blind spot for Google given that Bing now has some 500 million Facebook users to pull social data from. At the same time, Google is pulling data from your Twitter friends, which is something Bing does not, thus far, offer. However, given the relatively open nature of Twitter versus the closed nature of Facebook, it will likely be easier for Bing to add Twitter, than for Google to add Facebook.
The best search engine choice depends, for now, on which social networks you use. Facebook fans will find Bing a better match, while those using a wide variety of services will probably see more results from Google Social Search. For the new features to be useful you need a large social network, and your friends need to share your interests, otherwise the odds of your friends’ data showing up in either service are slim.
However, there’s a huge difference between liking something Facebook and posting a link to Twitter. Your friends may post a link to Twitter for just about any reason, perhaps even because the link leads to something so bad it’s funny. Liking something on Facebook is a more direct message: Your friends like it. That gives Microsoft’s social search effort a considerable advantage over Google’s, and much more valuable set of social data to fight off Google in the burgeoning social search war.
How much value Facebook’s status updates will add to Bing’s search results remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure, Bing is finally offering something Google doesn’t.
Google has updated its Social Search tool to add links, photos and relevant web pages from your friends to Google’s normal search results. The changes build on Google’s earlier social-search efforts and help add a more familiar, human element to your search results.
Google Social Search, which debuted in 2009, taps your social network to find search results from people you know. Although your friend’s Flickr photos of Yosemite might not normally rank high in a Google search, Social Search adds another layer to the algorithm-based results and makes sure that you see your friend’s photos when you search for “Yosemite.” In order to use Social Search you must be signed in to a Google account.
Back when social Search first launched any results Google found within your social networks were relegated to the bottom of the page. Today’s update changes that, mixing social results in with regular search results. The change not only makes it easier to find results from within your social network, it also signals that Google is getting more serious about social search as a first class offering.
Facebook already uses similar social network connections to surface helpful links and even recently started using your friends to promote and advertise products within the site. Google, on the other hand, has been slow to embrace social searching. This is only the the second update to its social search tool in nearly two years.
The second major change in this update is that Social Search will now add notes for links your friends have shared on Twitter and other sites. For example, if you search for a video of a singer slapping his guitarist after a bad solo, and your friend happens to have posted the same video to Twitter, that result might show up higher in your results. You’ll also see a note beneath the link, mentioning that your friend tweeted the video.
The last change in this update to Social Search gives you a bit more control over how your various social network accounts are linked to Social Search. Previously accounts were connected publicly through your Google profile page. That still works, but you can now also connect accounts privately, so no one else will know that you masquerade as @voltronsuperfan on Twitter. Of course, Google will still know, so if you’re concerned about maintaining your privacy, Social Search probably isn’t for you.
For an overview of how Google Social Search works, check out this video:
The word “server” is enough to send all but the hardiest nerds scurrying for cover.
The word usually conjures images of vast, complex data farms, databases and massive infrastructures. True, servers are all those things — but at a more basic level, they’re just like your desktop PC.
Running a server is no more difficult than starting Windows on your desktop. That’s the message Dave Winer, forefather of blogging and creator of RSS, is trying to get across with his EC2 for Poets project. The name comes from Amazon’s EC2 service and classes common in liberal arts colleges, like programming for poets or computer science for poets. The theme of such classes is that anyone — even a poet — can learn technology.
Winer wants to demystify the server. “Engineers sometimes mystify what they do, as a form of job security,” writes Winer, “I prefer to make light of it… it was easy for me, why shouldn’t it be easy for everyone?”
To show you just how easy it is to set up and run a server, Winer has put together an easy-to-follow tutorial so you too can set up a Windows-based server running in the cloud. Winer uses Amazon’s EC2 service. For a few dollars a month, Winer’s tutorial can have just about anyone up and running with their own server.
In that sense Winer’s EC2 for Poets if already a success, but education and empowerment aren’t Winer’s only goals. “I think it’s important to bust the mystique of servers,” says Winer, “it’s essential if we’re going to break free of the ‘corporate blogging silos.’”
The corporate blogging silos Winer is thinking of are services like Twitter and Facebook. Both have been instrumental in the growth of the web, they make it easy for anyone publish. But they also suffer denial of service attacks, government shutdowns and growing pains, centralized services like Twitter and Facebook are vulnerable. Services wrapped up in a single company are also vulnerable to market whims, Geocities is gone, FriendFeed languishes at Facebook and Yahoo is planning to sell Delicious. A centralized web is brittle web, one that can make our data, our communications tools disappear tomorrow.
But the web will likely never be completely free of centralized services and Winer recognizes that. Most people will still choose convenience over freedom. Twitter’s user interface is simple, easy to use and works on half a dozen devices.
Winer doesn’t believe everyone will want to be part of the distributed web, just the dedicated. But he does believe there are more people who would choose a DIY path if they realized it wasn’t that difficult.
Winer isn’t the only one who believes the future of the web will be distributed systems that aren’t controlled by any single corporation or technology platform. Microformats founder Tantek Çelik is also working on a distributed publishing system that seeks to retain all the cool features of the social web, but remove the centralized bottleneck.
But to be free of corporate blogging silos and centralized services the web will need an army of distributed servers run by hobbyists, not just tech-savvy web admins, but ordinary people who love the web and want to experiment.
So while you can get your EC2 server up and running today — and even play around with Winer’s River2 news aggregator — the real goal is further down the road. Winer’s vision is a distributed web where everything is loosely coupled. “For example,” Winer writes, “the roads I drive on with my car are loosely-coupled from the car. I might drive a SmartCar, a Toyota or a BMW. No matter what car I choose I am free to drive on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Sixth Avenue or the Bay Bridge.”
Winer wants to start by creating a loosely coupled, distributed microblogging service like Twitter. “I’m pretty sure we know how to create a micro-blogging community with open formats and protocols and no central point of failure,” he writes on his blog.
For Winer that means decoupling the act of writing from the act of publishing. The idea isn’t to create an open alternative to Twitter, it’s to remove the need to use Twitter for writing on Twitter. Instead you write with the tools of your choice and publish to your own server.
If everyone publishes first to their own server there’s no single point of failure. There’s no fail whale, and no company owns your data. Once the content is on your server you can then push it on to wherever you’d like — Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress of whatever the site du jour is ten years from now.
The glue that holds this vision together is RSS. Winer sees RSS as the ideal broadcast mechanism for the distributed web and in fact he’s already using it — Winer has an RSS feed of links that are then pushed on to Twitter. No matter what tool he uses to publish a link, it’s gathered up into a single RSS feed and pushed on to Twitter.
Dave Winer's RSS-centric vision of a distributed web image by dave winer via flickr
Winer will be first to admit that a distributed system like he imagines is still a little ways off, but as they say, the longest journey starts with a single step. For Winer EC2 for Poets is part of that first step. If you’ve never set up your own server, don’t even really totally understand what a server is, well, time to find out. Head on over to the EC2 for Poets site and you’ll have a server up and running fifteen minutes from now. The distributed web awaits you.
Google’s URL shortening service, goo.gl, has added an API, giving third-party developers a way to integrate the service into their own apps. The new API means Twitter clients and other apps that use short URLs can hook into goo.gl just like they do bit.ly and dozens of other shorteners.
The goo.gl API is, like most Google APIs, a RESTful JSON-based API. There are only three real methods — insert, list and get — but that’s enough info for apps to shorten and expand URLs, as well as fetch history and analytics for shortened links.
The goo.gl shortener is a late entry into an already crowded field, but of course the Google name carries a good bit of weight so you can expect most Twitter clients to add goo.gl to their list of URL shortening options. The goo.gl shortener also has a couple of nice extras like QR codes and, according to stat tracking site Pingdom, it’s both the fastest and most reliable URL shortener out there.
If you’d like to play with the new service, the API documentation and developer guide can be found on the Google Labs site. And yes, the API is a labs project and may be subject to change before it graduates into a real web service.
Today Google launched the beginnings of an API for the company’s Google+ social network.
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