I am trying to make a website based on google+ api. I just started looking into the api and it seems they dont have a method to extract a person's circles and friends as facebook does. The api is actually pretty minimal and I wanted to make sure I didnt miss anything. So has anyone used the google+ api and extracted friends information from a user's profile.
Currently, the Google+ API is an early developer preview. The only thing you can do is access public information read-only. However, there is an official Issue tracker for bugs and feature requests regarding the Google Plus platform.
To be more specific, there's also an open issue for the feature you want to have (access circles and friends). Make sure to "star" this issue in order to get notified when the methods are finally available. Furthermore, the more people star the issue, the more likely it is to be released soon (apparently the Googlers browse this list to determine which feature is requested a lot and which not).
Edit: As Nicholas points out, it is now indeed possible to retrieve a list of friends using people/list, provided you're using the new auth.login OAuth scope, which will give you access to all people that the user has chosen to share with your application.