I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell to make of Google+, and have assumed for a while that anything backed by Google would eventually find its breakout mechanism—but haven’t yet seen what that actually would be.

That is, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all have their happy little niches for how I use them. Facebook is where my personal networks mostly live, and is where I go to keep up with a far-flung network of friends and acquaintances whom I wouldn’t normally see in person. Facebook lends itself to a higher ratio of noise to signal than I’d generally prefer, but for that kind of community, extra noise is fine. You don’t shoot for “maximal efficiency” when you’re keeping in touch with friends.

Twitter, on the other hand, is mostly centered around my professional networks and the people I follow in my issue areas: writing, Mac stuff, Internet stuff, and progressive activism. Like Facebook, it’s where I go for news. Unlike Facebook, the shorter tweets and the limited link and discussion structure keeps it all much more management. Also, thank the gods, no Zynga.

LinkedIn: hell if I know. I put in enough effort to keep my network growing by looking up people I know. But I don’t actually use it. I keep hearing it’s a good place to pick up clients, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Google+? The biggest problem is that it looks too much like Facebook, so when I signed up and set up my circles, what I saw was pretty much a subset of Facebook. I still don’t use it, and I’m still waiting for it to figure out how to draw me in.

I think that might be happening now, with Twitter’s recent boneheaded move to restrict its API usage. The Twitter API is what allows all sorts of third-party apps to do cool things with Twitter streams that aren’t built in, and also allow third-party services to work with your tweets. For example, I use IFTTT to do two things every time I tweet: stick a copy of what I’ve written into Evernote in my diary notebook, and email a copy of the tweet into an archive mailbox for safekeeping. IFTTT also scans my tweets for a #fb tag, and if it sees one, it cross-posts to Facebook for me.

According to an email from IFTTT today, thanks to the API changes, all of that is going away. I can still use the service to post to Twitter, but I can’t use it to get anything out of Twitter. Like Facebook before it, Twitter is henceforth going to be a black hole, emitting only officially approved Hawking radiation.

I think this might be an opening for Google+ (and I’m completely dumbfounded why Twitter is shoving its head so relentlessly up its ass). Interoperability is what turns social networks from a microblogging service into an operating system for the Internet—and even casual users make use of that OS functionality, even if they’re not aware they’re doing so.

Like I said, I haven’t done much on Google+, so I don’t know what they have and have not implemented on the back end. But here’s what will make me sit up and take notice.

1. Excellent APIs. Give me very good ways of getting information into and out of Google+ in real time. For example, I now need a new “first place” to type up things that I then want to direct into Twitter and/or Facebook. If Google+ is that place, I’m going to start using it immediately. (I assume this is not the case, as if it were, IFTTT would have a recipe for it already.)

2. An escape clause. One thing that really annoys me about Twitter is how hard it is to go backwards. My theory is, if I’ve ever written it, I want to keep it for posterity. And most of what I write on Twitter are snarky replies to other tweets. I can’t save that easily. Likewise on Facebook: there are ways to get my own timeline out of it, but if I’m in a comment thread on someone else’s wall, I can’t get back there. I understand all of the Big 3 have ways of downloading this stuff—bonus points to Google if they let me get back anything that I’ve created and shared, regardless of where I put it.

3. Creative data formats. What really surprised me about Google+ was its adoption of “someone posts, then everyone comments.” There must be better and more useful ways of creating interactions. How about, instead of a separate events system, having posts in a date template where interactions can be comments, attendance, or other similar events? Turning messages more overtly into objects, and allowing other items in Google+ act on those objects, creates an ecosystem which is far more likely to leave competitors in the dust—especially if you provide mechanisms for the average user to do powerful things with this data.

But those are all lagniappes. The next winner of the social wars will be whomever makes it easiest to get stuff in from any number of places (computers, mobile, what-have-you), and equally easy to get stuff out. But the only competitors are the people who have critical mass—which rules out LinkedIn and App.net for the foreseeable future.

I thought this would be Twitter, but they’re fumbling the ball. Google has an iffy track record here, but hopefully has executives who realize that Google+ is badly in need of some oxygen. I’m not placing any bets as yet, but they’re the best set up to capitalize on this.