The History API - What Is It and What Could It Become?

Posted by on
The History API was announced in June 2012, and whilst it is still not entirely clear what it is going to be used for - it has a lot of potential. Let's take a look at what it is and what it could become.

 Google explains what the History API is on its Google Developers site:
"We think the difference between saving and sharing is really important for communicating online. After all, not every thought that crosses your mind comes out of your mouth. Google+ features, like Instant Upload, give you control over how you save and share your photos. With Google+ history, we’re starting to bring this save/share capability to other online activities.
When you sign up for the developer preview, your site or app will be able to privately save moments, such as a listened song, or a visited restaurant, to your users’ Google+ history. From there, your users can, if they want, share those moments with others, directly to the stream and/or on their profile. In all cases, moments in history include attribution of your site or app."
In a nutshell, the History API allows developers to write 'moments' to a user-accessible private area on Google+. The user can then choose whether to share these moments or keep them private.

Please note - the History API is currently only visible and available to developers, so you will not be able to see the History tab on Google+.

Example Usage

When the History API initially launched I implemented it into one my own sites to test out its functionality. The particular site was a forum and you can see two moments have been written to my history from it here:

Experimenting with the History API
I used the API to write to a user's history whenever they created a topic on the forum. This way users would be able to share topics they created to their Google+ followers for increased engagement.

Moments

There are multiple types of moments which can be written to a users history. Google was already implemented moments into many of its key services.
  • Google+ - All +1's of external websites and instant upload photos.
  • Google - When you search for a variety of things that fall within the same subject. For example - 'Researched Android'.
  • Google Play - When you purchase an app.
  • YouTube - Every video you watched whilst signed into YouTube.
Once the History API goes public Google will most likely integrate many more services, as well as lots of external websites making use of the API.

Development

Whilst development on the History API appears to be relatively slow, there have already been a number of changes to the API. These changes are mostly changes to the interface of the history tab on Google+, but they help to reveal the direction Google wishes to take with the API.

Changes started to be seen towards the end of September 2012, the first being this minor tweak to the user interface:

The header was changed from black to white

The next set of changes involved 'Research' moments which Google search has been writing to our history. We discovered we were able to click on these moments, presenting a 'task' page. This page provided an in-depth look at the particular subject we had been searching, and allowed us to write comments about each search for others to see.
The placement of items on these task pages were regularly changed

At first these pages seemed to be quite useless, that is until Google introduced a way to make searching much more social, with the ability to share these 'task' pages to your circles on Google+.

The share button on a task page
Even into October, updates to the History API were continuing to trickle in, one of which was a more refined design to the 'task' pages, sporting new buttons and and a simpler layout.




We had been reporting these changes over at our page as they happened, and late October 2012 I found that these task pages had been disabled completely. Attempting to access them redirected me back to the Google+ homepage.

Whether this is because the feature has been removed, or because Google decided they didn't want us to see what they were working on - is still currently unknown.

What's next?

It has been well over half a year since the API was released into preview - yet it still hasn't seen the light of day. We know that +Vic Gundotra has said many times that they are working hard to create a Write API without producing spam - could this be it?

The History API allows users complete control over what is posted to their Google+ stream and so could prove popular as opposed to the frictionless sharing model which that other social networking website has implemented.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments on Google+ what you think the future of the History API is, and whether it is something you would like to use.