Google quietly unveiled a neat new feature called Google+ History, bringing your activity from all over the Web into one place - Google+. This feature is currently available only to developers so they can make software to support it before Google makes it available to users.
Basically, the new Google+ History feature will allow third-party apps, sites and services to share information regarding your online activities with Google+. If you post something on Twitter, for instance, you will find a copy of that tweet in your Google+ profile. Google+ History will not share such content gathered from other sites with your friends, it will simply place copies of that content in a secure, private space on Google+, where only you can see it. If you do want to share some of that content, you would have to explicitly do so.
Google+ currently exists only as an API (application programming interface), enabling software components to interact and connect, and as a preview for developers so they can test their software. When it comes to functionality, Google+ History is similar to Google's Instant Upload feature, which automatically uploads any picture you take with your phone to your Google+ profile, without sharing them with anyone. Google+ History actually seems like an expansion of Instant Uploads, enabling more types of content to be "instantly uploaded" and making that functionality available to other companies besides Google. The greatest part is, of course, that this automatic uploading of content remains private. If you want to share it, you take specific action to do so; if not, you can simply ignore it and no one will know but you. The feature uploads the content for you, but you have to do the sharing.
The Google+ History API comes as a more discreet, sensible alternative to Facebook's Open Graph API. While Facebook's Open Graph enables any service or app to post content to a user's Facebook profile, requiring only a one-time permission from the user, Google+ History enables those services to prepare content to be posted, but not actually posting it.
Automated posts "don't really work," Google+ vice president Bradley Horowitz said at the Google I/O 2012 developer conference last week. And they don't really work because they encourage third-party social sites to exploit the users. While many don't play this game, this incentive still pits social sites against each other in a race to see which one can gain the most users through Facebook's API. The app that can convince the most people to sign up wins, but the users' reputation is usually at stake. For instance, sites share enticing content with a user's Facebook friends, but those friends cannot see the content unless they sign up as well. By signing up, they too start to automatically spam their friends with enticing content, and so on.
Google+ History aims to predict what users may want to share and prepare that content for them, but the user has full control over what to share. Perhaps Facebook could learn a thing or two from this feature, especially now when it has angered so many users with its practices.
