On Dzone.com today Giorgio Sironi has a new post looking at a relatively new release on the social networking scene for developers, the Google+ Api, and some details on how you get get started writing apps using the features it offers.

Google+ recently releases to developers the first version of its Api, which focuses on public data about profiles and their activities: status updates, resharings and links. I dived into the Api and wrote a small sample application to get a feel of how easy is to get started, and what can we do with the Api for now. All the code is at the bottom of this post.

He goes through the steps you'll need to get set up - registering an application, getting a library to help make the connection (here's a PHP one) and configuring it with your credentials. You can get "People" and "Activities" information from the API. He shows some sample output for each - basic user information (nested arrays) and some of his activities (again, nested arrays). He includes the source for his sample application that pulls a user's profile information and lists out their latest (public) activities.