I want to start this off by saying how incredibly talented Mohamed Mansour, and those coding with him are. Google+ released their API to the public yesterday afternoon, and within 10 hours the first useful, functioning mash-up was released by Mohamed and his team. The mash-up is called Stream+, and classifies all your posts into a nice orderly interface.
Stream+ basically takes all of a user’s public posts and categorizes them into topics. It will then list the topics on the left hand side of the screen, and all the posts in an orderly fashion down the center. All you have to do to use the mash-up is go to the Stream+ appspot page, click the “Connect Me,” button, and then allow permission. It will take a little while (more than one would hope) for it to query the public stream, and classify them in memory, however, the delay is caused by the API and not the coder’s faults. Once complete you will have an orderly view of all your posts you’ve made on Google+.
As I mentioned before, the coding team, lead by Mohamed, which included Carmelyne Thompson,Jake McCuistion, and Eric Martindale worked feverishly to get this mash-up out to the public. Here is a timeline of the event that went into the building of Stream+
- 2:56 PM – Posted about the API on my Stream
- 3:00 – Reading the stream on peoples reaction
- 3:17 – Downloading and installing the development tools
- 3:44 – Creating App Engine and OAuth2 tokens
- 3:55 – Deploy example app to AppEngine
- 4:00 – Create application and learn AppEngine/OAuth2
- 4:15 – Start developing application.
- 4:45 – Get Carmelyne, my best web developer to design me a sweet looking page
- 5:30 – Prototype for app completed and working, classification complete.
- 5:40 – Creating API to make asynchronous requests
- 6:30 – User Interface Integrated into application
- 7:15 – Testing With the UI changes
- 8:00 – Fix classification to parse out html tags.
- 8:10 – Redesigning UI to make it even more beautiful.
- 12:30 AM – Released to the public.
Note that Stream+ is still a work in progress, and the team will be adding features, as well as languages (currently only supports English) in the future.
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