Rudimentary GooglePlus API

 It’s Sunday, I’m at a loose end. Idle hands do the devil’s work, and today that work is to pick at the Google+ Profile page, and make a read-only API out of it.

There’s some nice JSON in there. And when I say nice, I mean undocumented and weird. But there’s good data in there. So, I’ve written some rudimentary code to pull it out and return it to you. What’s the format? That’s for me not to know, and for you to find out.

So, you need a profile id, and you’re good to go. The api is here: http://my.syyn.cc/gpapi. But how do you use it?

If I want to use it, I start with my profile, which is here: https://plus.google.com/100281903174934656260/posts. That gives me profile id, which is 100281903174934656260. I slap that into the api using this url: http://my.syyn.cc/gpapi?id=100281903174934656260 . Give it a click, have a look. Machine readable data. Good!

The parameters you can specify:

• id=(profileid) — required
• type=[profile|posts] — optional. profile gives you just profile info. posts gives you just the post list. Anything else, or leaving it out, you get everything.
• debug=true — an easier to read format, not for machine readability

so for example

http://my.syyn.cc/gpapi?id=100281903174934656260&type=profile&debug=true

is a bit easier to read through.

This on the other hand is unformatted JSON, of my posts

http://my.syyn.cc/gpapi?id=100281903174934656260&type=posts

Anyway, techy types do try it out and let me know what you think. Good luck!

UPDATES

I’ve added some features.

Use “prettyposts” instead of “posts” to get a cleaned up version of post information. Informative attribute names! Only relevant stuff! You’ll like it.

Also, every post has its own page, with an url like this https://plus.google.com/100281903174934656260/posts/ExJbXW9remW .

If you use id=100281903174934656260/posts/ExJbXW9remW in the api, you’ll get just the data for that post, from the post page, rather than for all recent posts from the profile page. An advantage of this is that the post page has more comments loaded (all comments?) rather than the very shortened list which is on the profile page.

So for instance try this:

http://my.syyn.cc/gpapi?id=100281903174934656260/posts/ExJbXW9remW&type=prettyposts&debug=true

More to come.