One of <i>the</i> biggest (and best) ways Google could differentiate G+ from Facebook would be by moving away from the "walled garden" approach. Having comprehensive APIs for interacting with their service is an important part of that. Utilizing semantic web technologies to provide "smart data" instead of dumb data would be an important move as well. But Google don't seem to have much interest in going down this path, and I - for one - think that's a huge mistake.<p>I mean, yeah, I like G+ and I use it a fair amount... and that's partly because there are places where it's legitimately superior to Facebook in my estimation. But the failure to truly open up is something I look at as a <i>huge</i> disappointment and it is really killing a lot of my enthusiasm for G+.<p>IOW: "Damnit Google, jump on the federated social network bandwagon, implement comprehensive APIs and TEAR DOWN THOSE WALLS."
> opening up an API would pollute the stream<p>Although an API for Google+ would be very useful, I can see the sense in the above statement. Having only human generated content in Google+ adds a certain quality to it. That being said, there are other ways than an API to post content to Google+, I'm sure.
I don't see why they don't just provide the API and ban cross posting if that is their concern. If they are willing to go on witch hunts searching for users whose names aren't real then I'm sure they can do the same for apps that are facilitating cross posting and retract keys.<p>Personally a big minus for me at the moment for G+ is the lack of a decent tablet app for it. The tablet apps are just the phone apps scaled up and they completely fail at it. This would be solved for them in about 5 minutes if Google would just open up an API.
I hear this "polluting the stream" argument a lot .. but what is really so bad about someone cross-posting from Twitter ?<p>Wouldn't that be a great way for Google to capture some of the Twitter content (which would be more valuable IMHO) ?