Google Buzz took everyone by a storm. A small one at that, but people who frequently use GMail now had the ability to track their friends and follow their activity from within GMail. Google not only allowed feeds from its own services like Picasa, we can also get the updates from some approved services like Twitter and as it turns out you can also add your own WordPress feeds to Buzz if you want. Google had done it again – well almost.
One thing Buzz was seriously lacking – is still lacking is the ability to export Buzz updates to other sites like twitter. This has been one of the most annoying thing for me. If Twitter can export to Buzz then why can’t I do the opposite thing as well? But I can, there are now applications that let you post your Buzz updates to Twitter. Here’s how you can do that ?
- Visit your own Google profile here.
- Almost all browsers support feeds now, in the address bar on the right hand side, there’s an icon of RSS feed, click on that.
- Alternatively, you can find the same feed at the URL, http://buzz.googleapis.com/feeds/{user.id}/public/posted
- This feed only posts all the entries marked public and skips the private entries.
- Now head over to a service that allows posting to Twitter from RSS feeds.
- I have briefly summarized 2 services below.
Twitterfeed
Twitterfeed is one of the best feed posting services available. You can chose from an abundance of options like whether you want to post just the title of the feed, or a bit of text to go with it, which URL shortening service you want to use, whether you want a prefix to each tweet (like noob2geek:).
This service also provides some of statistical data to let you figure out which ones of your posts is generating how many clicks from twitter and details of such things. You can sign up with a free account for Twitterfeed here.
Buzz can tweet
Buzz can tweet, as the name suggests, is primarily a service for posting your buzz feeds to Twitter. It summarizes your Buzz posts in URLs and posts them to twitter making it possible for your followers to get the full enjoyment.
It will share everything from Google services (Maps, Picasa, etc) and will filter the Twitter posts sent to Buzz. Which is the whole point in synchronization after-all. Similar to Twitterfeed like we have the features to chose our choice of shortening services. One added feature is you can optionally only post the Buzz posts tagged as #twitter to Twitter and exclude the rest. If the posts are smaller than 140 characters, there are no links made back to Buzz.
Both these services have problems associated with Buzz. They cannot, in real time, update twitter just like Buzz cannot sync from Twitter in real time. Apart from this glitch, everything else is good to go.
