Allowing them complete access to Google Buzz activity

Jul 20, 2010 11:09 GMT  ·  By

Google Buzz hasn’t proven the success Google would have liked, but poor initial response is not reason enough to give up. The company has been building on top of the service since it launched and has now opened up the full Google Buzz firehose for developers who will have complete access to all the content generated by Buzz users, in real time. Google is revealing the new feature along with its initial five partners which have already built tools on top of the firehose.

“We're launching the Google Buzz firehose — our top developer feature request. With the firehose, all public activities are available as they are published with a single subscription, thanks to syndication via PubSubHubbub,” John Panzer, from the Google Buzz Team, wrote.

“We’ve had some fun coming up with cool things to do with the firehose. For example, Bob Aman coded up Buzz Mood, an App Engine app inspired by Twistori. By scanning for posts that contain certain keywords, Bob’s able to give us a sense for the mood across all of Google Buzz in real time,” he explained.

The Google Buzz firehose has been tapped into by Collecta, Gnip, OneRiot, Postrank Analytics, and Superfeedr’s Track, already. Collecta and OneRiot are both real-time search engines so the deal for them is a no-brainer.

Google introduced the Buzz API a couple of months back at this year’s Google I/O conference. It enabled developers to build applications around the Buzz environment, and many have done so, but the real prize was access to the entire data stream. With this, other companies can build any number of services and products aggregating user behaviour and content.

Google also launched a few new APIs enabling developers to access a user’s comments, a user’s likes and share counts. Twitter has been touting its own ‘firehose’ access and several companies, large and small, have been using it to power or enhance their own services, including Google.