Google+ released an API for developers, last week and now it has got its first third party application. The app was developed by Mohamed Mansour, a software engineer and it’s called Stream+. What the app does is it reduces the clutter that exists in your stream and it allows you to categorize updates. It uses machine learning algorithms to automatically categorize updates into more categories. Mansour says, “Some categories are not meaningful, and I am trying to optimize it further which is quite difficult. It is by no means a tag cloud which does basic keyword frequencies. It is using advanced algorithms that I have been using from the last year or so, that does stemming, closest document distance, ranking, etc. It is ordered by the number of documents in the category with rank, that is why you can see the first rank smaller than the second one because there are more documents in latter than its former.”
Mansour says that the Google+ API was very easy to learn and use, but it suffers from extreme slowness in practice. He said, stating that the API is not very responsive,”It takes 30+ seconds to query the public stream (not many posts) and another 5+ seconds to classify them in memory!” He also said that he built the API without knowing how to use AppEngine or OAuth before. He is a commiter to Chromium and a Google Qualified Developer for Chrome Extensions. Since the API that Google released was very limited, Mansour has basically proven that something CAN be done with it. Whether the app is useful yet or not is yet to be seen, but Google is working to at least make the API more useful.
