EXCLUSIVE: Google+ History API will bring in your past updates from around the web
Stop the dadgum presses! Googler Louis Gray just told us about a new Google+ feature that you won't read about anywhere else. — Called Google+ History, this new API will let you add past statuses …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google+’s earlier rollout had focused on extending access to Google Apps users and outlining tools for business profiles, including business-profile analytics. The History API adds a different lever: a way to give a profile an immediate record rather than requiring every item to originate inside Google+.
The move also follows Google’s 2011 work on social search, where social activity was treated as useful context for discovery. Importing older updates makes the Google+ profile a broader index of a user’s existing social activity.
First-order effects
- Google+ users can populate their profiles with past updates from other web services, reducing the blank-profile problem for people joining or becoming active on the network.
- Developers and services that expose compatible update histories gain a route for their users’ content to appear in Google+.
Second-order effects
- Google+ can compete for attention with a profile built from accumulated activity, rather than only from posts created after a user joins.
- Services supplying update histories face a clearer trade-off between keeping activity exclusive to their own feeds and allowing users to reuse it in Google+.
Third-order effects
- If social platforms increasingly accept imported histories, the value of a social profile shifts from a closed stream of native posts toward a portable identity record assembled across services.
The trend: Social platforms are moving toward profiles that aggregate a person’s activity across the web instead of relying solely on content created within one network.