Well, this is convenient. This morning we brought you word that Google was adding Events support to the Google Places API. It’s no secret that Google has its APIs work together in one big happy family so one feature hitting one API means that it’s surely going to hit other services as well, right?
That appears to be the case today as The Verge has found some code for interesting new features in the newly updated Google+ app for Android. It was previously released on iOS, but Google promised a “few extra surprises” for the Android app. Besides the Hangouts functionality, the code seems to contain the surprise.
A photo, courtesy of The Verge, shows the APK for the Google+ app that references two features called “Events” and “Local.” They obviously aren’t showing up in the app proper so they must be getting prepared for adding the functionality in the new future.
It gets more interesting when you consider that Google has just added Events to the Places API. It could be a signal for a big push on Google’s part to get Events into Google+ and their other services. It could also be just a placeholder that will serve no real purpose for months or years to come. It’s hard to tell whenever stuff like this shows up in code.
Google may say that it’s not competing with Facebook, but it certainly wants the features that Facebook touts over it. If Google can do something interesting with events that makes it more useful than Events on Facebook, I think they have a chance of attracting new users or those who have left.
As always, none of this is confirmed. If we lived in a perfect world, Google+ would already have support for events. The Bing Bang Theory getting another season proves that is not the case, so we’ll have to wait until Google decides to add Events proper to their flagship social service.