Google+ pages API released to “partners” first. Why?

It appears selected companies were given access to more features of the Google+ API. Now, that’s lame. There are two sides of this: what companies get from it, and what google gets. And it’s a stupid move from whichever perspective you look at it.

• The chosen companies are already market leaders. Why would google give them even more competitive advantage. It looks rather unfair to other companies that are trying to compete with “the chosen ones”. Yeah, Google doesn’t have to be fair. Well, it does, if it wants to retain its image of an open and “not evil” company. If Oracle or Apple have done that – well, whatever, you’d expect it from them anyway. But Google is different, right?
• Even if the above point is nonsense, having just a few companies use the API would provide way less feedback than if it was open. And that’s what they try to do – make a better API. Wait, they can’t make a good API without someone else using it for a long time? You design an API, label it “version one”, and if it turns out to be horrible, improve it with minor tweaks or make “version two”. It worked pretty well for companies that didn’t know how to scale APIs (twitter, facebook). So it should work for Google.

By the way, they did the same with games. A few companies were given the privilege to build games. What happened? All the games I tried were crap. That’s not how the open market functions – you don’t choose the best ones – they compete for it.

This rant has nothing to do with the fact that my startup wants the Pages API. It doesn’t – welshare doesn’t even support Facebook pages (because it’s for power users, not for companies). But I just wanted to point out that this kind of decisions are not doing any good to Google+.

And something else – it’s almost December, and they still haven’t released the sharing and circles APIs. Waiting for all the buzz to die, or what?