The API is in the early stages, but Google plans to move fast

Sep 21, 2011 16:31 GMT  ·  By

Google made quite a lot of announcements for Google+, but the biggest were around Hangouts, the group video chat feature. Hangouts got quite a lot of improvements, you can broadcast to a wide audience now, you can doodle something with your friends, you can collaborate on a Google Docs document and so on.

"In the three months since we launched face-to-face-to-face communication in Google+ Hangouts, I’ve been impressed by the many ways people use them," Richard Dunn, Technical lead, Google+ platform for Hangouts, said.

"We’ve seen Hangouts for game shows, fantasy football drafts, guitar lessons and even hangouts for writers to break their solitary confinement," he said.

"That’s just the beginning. Real-time applications are more engaging, fun, and interactive, but were hard for developers to deliver. Until now," he added.

The biggest and most exciting new things about Hangouts may yet to come, since Google has debuted the Hangouts API, albeit in a preview mode.

The API enables anyone to build an app that can work with Hangouts to add functionality, the same way the gadgets unveiled by Google do.

"Today we’re launching the Developer Preview of the Hangouts API, another small piece of the Google+ platform," he announced.

"It enables you to add your own experiences to Hangouts and instantly build real-time applications, just like our first application, the built-in YouTube player," he explained.

This is just an initial release. There are a limited number of things you can do with Hangouts at this point and there's no way to publish an app, it only works with the people you specify.

Developers are encouraged to register their apps and add the ones they want testing them to the list of approved users.

For now, Google has provided a few multimedia APIs, devs can mute audio and video feeds for example, but they're mostly a proof of concept and something to get you started.

Google has much bigger plans for the Hangouts API though and wants feedback so it knows what needs work and what to focus on. Google debuted the first Google+ APIs a few days ago.