plusser: A Google+ API Interface for R

The central aim of plusser is to facilitate access to the Google+ API for retrieving posts and profiles from Google's social network. This package is especially suited to harvest texts and covariate data for social media analysis.

For social media data harvests, this package provides three key functions:

• harvestPage to retrieve messages a user posted publicly
• harvestProfile to retrieve data from a user's profile (i.e. about the user)
• harvestActivity to retrieve the +1ers and resharers of a specific post.

The results are intentionally kept simple for now, so that they can be easily used in text mining or predictive modeling contexts. There are basic parsing functions provided. Users can also use their own parsing functions if required. At the moment, this package implements basic authentication (via API keys) only. Full OAuth 2.0 authentication will be implemented later. This will then also be the basis for functions posting in a user's name.