It seems that Google has been on a relentless campaign to get Google+ to work. From only allowing YouTube users to comment with a Google+ account to their desperate attempts to integrate it into Google’s own search results (which seem to be all but gone now…) it all seems to be very pointless on Google’s behalf.
Their problems have been two sided. Firstly, they have battled the massive loss of data that has happened thanks to Facebook now having much of the information that was once the forte of GMail (although they still do have YouTube) but on their own side, it seems that Google have still not really wanted to side with people trying to integrate with their own social platform.
With Facebook and Twitter, it is extremely simple to get external applications to post to the respective accounts. Seriously, you can get an API account set up literally in three minutes, and information posted on either of the respective streams within another 20 minutes.
Google+? Dream on.
Despite the fact that Google has released this functionality to a select group of partners (of which only HootSuite comes to mind…), Google after more then three years seems to feel that this functionality should be all but unavailable.
Issue #43 has been around in Google+’s platform issue tracker since September 2011 and to this day there have been nothing but excuses.
More then 400 developers ask Google for a feature inside their API, and the best that Google can come up with is that their API needs to be perfect before they release it.
People have their hopes on write access to Google+ being a well kept secret that is to be revealed at Google I/O this year, but I am unsure about that.
I don’t get what is the deal? Why does Google have a social platform that still has no documentation for writing to the Google+ streams? You look at all of the major social platforms like Twitter and Facebook and there is much growth that can be attributed to having an API.
Google’s mission is “[…] to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Here are developers that are hanging to give you (Google) information. Google: please get this; we want to be able to feed you data, and your not allowing is to put it into your hands.
With Facebook dropping it’s organic reach, it’s no longer useful to disseminate information on that platform, as the cost to benefit ratio is deteriorating as Facebook tries to get us to pay more to get the organic reach of days gone past.
Google’s inability to listen to clients wants (and somewhat arguably, their needs) have been their downfall.
They had their chance with a nice simple interface and the ability to comfortably share long form texts to be the replacement for blogs. Now all Google+ feels like a really noisy version of medium.com.
These days, all I use Google+ for is to complain about the fact that I can’t post to Google+ using software, and instead must use their web interface. As someone who wants to post Google+ content for five different content brands with one or two pieces of original content per brand with twelve different writers, this is almost impossible. I don’t want to hand out these login details to my writers, they should be able to share the content from within their content management platform.
But really, this ranting is all in vain. I already quit Google+ for my brands last month. I asked Google for these features, they never came.
No difference was ever felt. Even with Facebook’s decreased organic reach, one brand that has more followers on Facebook receives a higher click through rate for content then a Google+ page with more followers.