Google+, the most recent big name social networking site to be launched, is continuing to frustrate developers worldwide with it’s not-so-complete Application Programming Interface (API).

An API is a set of functions and essentially a programming language (and it use that term very loosely!) that allow third party developers to develop applications and websites that interact with them.

Facebook has a similar API for it’s own service, unsurprisingly called, yep, you guessed it, Facebook API.

Now with the Facebook API you can (as long as you have sufficient permissions from the user) access profile information, friends lists wall posts, about me, work history and a great deal more information and use this to enhance the experience for Facebook users on your own website.  You can even post to their wall, update their status, share photos and videos etc.

Now the reason why the Google+ API (based on OpenSocial – a popular open source social networking platform) is frustrating developers?  Well, if you want information, such as the profile information, ‘circles’ information etc you’re fine.  But a lot of data from your Google+ site cannot currently be shared.  The major thing however is that communication with the Google+ API is pretty much all one way.  You can get information from it, but cannot send (for example update status posts, add new photos etc) back to it currently.

Now Google+ is based, and is largely composed of OpenSocial – which has all these functions in place.  But Google+ has it’s own special variant of OpenSocial and currently hasn’t released any functions to send information to Google+ or even got all the functions to retrieve all the information from Google+, if authorised.

Until Google+ does this it is unlikely to see as rapid growth in app development on it’s platform as Facebook – who has new websites and apps appearing everyday that integrate the worlds biggest social network.

No doubt it is in the plans of Google to release a fully functioning and comprehensive API but we hope this is in the near future.  Every day that it is not released they are likely to fall even further away from Facebook, who already have, without doubt, the commanding share of the social networking market.

A while ago, Google created a little easter egg in it’s search engine.  The ‘Barrel Roll’ easter egg spins the page around if you use the search engine to search for “do a barrel roll”.

Sounds fun, right?  Wrong!  As the craze has gradually spread over the Internet, Googles “do a barrel roll” search now appears as the top result after you type “do ” in it’s autocomplete function.  The effect of this is that now when you start any search query in Google with “do ” your page starts spinning around.

The first time it might be slightly amusing and scary, by the second time it’s most definitely boring!

One concern is that it may confuse some users of the popular search engine that their browser has been hijacked or that they have been infected with malicious software.  To the users that it doesn’t confuse, it most definitely does annoy.

What do you think of Google’s ‘Barrel Roll’.  Love it or loathe it?  Let us know in the comments section.

Name	Google Chrome
Category	Multiple OS – Web Browser
URL	http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en-GB/landing_tv.html
Rating (out of 5)

Description

Chrome is supposed to be the new dawn in web browsing history.

Google describe the software as follows:

“Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the Web faster, safer, and easier. Use one box for everything–type in the address bar and get suggestions for both search and Web pages. Thumbnails of your top sites let you access your favorite pages instantly with lightning speed from any new tab. Desktop shortcuts allow you to launch your favorite Web apps straight from your desktop.

What’s new in this version: This release fixes login issues to Barrons Online and The Wall Street Journal.”

Review

Only a few weeks ago, Google Chrome would have got 4 or 5 out 5 rating from DPS Computing for being such a wonderful new browser and a breath of fresh air in the market.  But unfortunately, we’ve discovered a major flaw with it during testing which means that it’s lucky it’s getting any stars at all.  With Firefox becoming a memory hogging browser and Safari just not quite cutting it, Internet users have now for a while been looking for an alternative.  An alternative came along in Chrome but Google recently ruined it by making it do some of the most annoying things on earth.  Google Chrome evidently doesn’t like Mac OS X (it may even be an issue on Windows as well but we haven’t tested that) as after a varying time of usage the browser will just crash.  At first you will still be able to change tabs but you won’t be able to interact with any of the pages.  Slowly, and no matter what you do, the browser will eventually completely crash and it’ll take OS X down with it.  The reasons for this are unknown.  From our research it appears that there are many many people suffering with this problem and the only replies that DPS Computing have seen from Google are that they are aware of this problem and are working on a fix.  As far as we’re concerned, for an bug which is so major that it crashes the uncrashable, it should have been fixed, like, yesterday!  Until a time that Google has sorted out this issue we’ve had to reduce the rating to 3/5.  And to be honest, it’s lucky that it’s even got that.  Hopefully, for Windows users, this issue isn’t present.  We’ll have a try out in Windows and see what happens.  If the same thing happens as on OS X don’t be surprised when we take the rating down to 0 or 1 out of 5!!

If you’re on Mac OS X and you’re a gluten for punishment, you can always download it from the link below 

Download

http://www.google.com/chrome?hl=en-GB