2012-03-12

Google+ Makes A Big Misktake With The API

What is wrong with Google lately? I know some people don't like automatic posting, I learned from that Google+ article, but the consequences are bad.


io2008_vic
io2008_vic (Photo credit: Fotinakis)
This is really a downturn for Google+.
+Vic Gundotra tells us at SXSW, the Google+ API will not have write access anytime soon. And it's not even planned for this year. Kiss your idea bye bye for having apps posting your check-in or likes.


Well, I tell you what is not going to happen: Massive amount of people, businesses and news sites are giving up their own blog or site and come to Google+ to post their stuff trapped inside another social network. Not even if Google+ would be the leading network.It's not going to happen.
News agencies dual posting manually to G+ and their own site. Most professional bloggers won't either. There is no value that outweighs the afford.It's not going to happen.
Mobile bloggers and quick mobile news postings, wont be made, because you would need to manually post it twice to "the rest of the Internet" and G+. Guess who will win? It's not going to happen.


I can't see me doing this. My blog is my home. Not yet another social network. My blogs have survived many shifts and services over the last decade. I tried to be "exclusive" on an social network before. It was a disaster.
I can't see businesses are doing it. The companies homepage is important. Having the newest articles on G+ is fine, and users will appreciate it. But there needs to be a way to do that automatically.
I'm wondering about some people, not all, supporting this absurd read-only API with the fear of "spam" or "bot-posts". I can't understand that fear. Here's why:


You have to circle someone to see their post. If you do so, and seeing that someone pulls in some crap feeds, or never engages in conversation, it's just a click and they are uncircled. You can even block/report someone if it's plain spam. So where the heck is the problem? I don't get it.
On the other site, without the ability to autopost stuff on Google+, the users there will lose a lot of, possible very important and interesting stuff, because of the above mentioned sites and users that will never manually post their stuff.


Without the write-access for the API, users on G+ are the losers. With the quick mobile world, nobody will post to every network separately. It looks like Google trying to force people to be on G+ exclusively. But I don't see how they will force the important people to go completely to that service.
I can't give someone a link to my Google+ profile, because not all of my activities on the net are aggregated there. So I still have to give my Twitter-feed. Because anything related to me is there.
The questions remains what Google wants to go with G+. A small private network, or a big source of information for everyone?