Sunday 25 September 2011

Google+ Hangouts API

In the three months since Google launched face-to-face-to-face communication in Google+ Hangouts, We’ve been impressed by the many ways people use them. We’ve seen Hangouts for game shows, fantasy football drafts, guitar lessons and even hangouts for writers to break their solitary confinement. That’s just the beginning. Real-time applications are more engaging, fun, and interactive, but were hard for developers to deliver. Until now. Google launching the Developer Preview of the Hangouts API, another small piece of the Google+ platform. 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. The integration model is simple -- you build a web app, register it with them, and specify who on your team can load it into their Hangout. Your app behaves like a normal web app, plus it can take part in the real-time conversation with new APIs like synchronization. Now you can create a "shared state" among all instances of your app so that all of your users can be instantly notified of changes made by anyone else. (This is how the YouTube player keeps videos in sync.) And we’ve added our first few multimedia APIs so you can, for example, mute the audio and video feeds of Hangout participants. When you’re ready to start hacking, they’re ready for you -- read the documentation, sign up, and start coding. We’re anxious to see, since this is a very early version of the API. They promise to make improvements and moving towards full production based on what we learn.

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