Google Buzz API adds Track and some improvements

Let's say you're really interested in coffee and tea and would like to know every time someone talks about them. You've been able to do that for the web with Google Alerts. Now you will be able to do the same thing for Google Buzz with our latest feature: Track. Plus, you can restrict your search to a specific geographic area! This API will allow you to enter a search query and from then on receive any new public Google Buzz posts—in real time—that match that query. It uses PubSubHubbub, which is the same open standard used by our fire and garden hoses.

To start receiving updates, you only need to send a query to the track endpoint, subscribe to the returned link, and then start receiving updates. If you'd like to take it for a quick spin, simply subscribe to a track endpoint via Google Reader (which happens to support PubSubHubbub). For example, if you’d like to receive all the new public Google Buzz posts about coffee or tea, simply open Google Reader, click "Add a subscription," and paste in the following URL:

https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/activities/track?q=coffee+OR+tea

Two of our firehose partners, Gnip and SuperFeedr are already using this feature. Gnip was able to add the feature into their API aggregation service with only a couple hours of work; their service update should be live early next week.

We’re excited to see what you develop with this cool new feature. Please note that it’s experimental and we may make changes in response to its use.

Additionally, we’ve been looking for ways to make the development experience with the Google Buzz API easier. One of the things we think we can improve upon are error messages. So, over the next couple weeks we’ll be rolling out significantly improved error messaging.

For example, if you tried to read an activity without including the activity id before today, you’d receive an HTTP error code and nothing else. Starting today, you’d also get a detailed error message returned in the body of the response:

<errors xmlns="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005">
<error>
 <domain>GData</domain>
 <code>required</code>
 <location type="parameter">postId</location>
 <internalReason>Post ID is required.</internalReason>
</error>
</errors>

The count API we announced back in mid-July has been returning the the number of times a specified link was shared on Google Buzz. We have started including short links (e.g. tinyurl.com/runningwithfins) in the count as well. Now you can specify the long link or any corresponding short link to get the total available count. This will give developers a much more complete count of links to a certain URL, however indirect.

Please visit the Google Buzz API documentation site for more details on these updates and swing by the Developer Forum if you have any questions.

By Ivaylo Popov, Google Buzz Team

New Google Buzz API features, including a hose of fire

Since we introduced the Google Buzz API at Google I/O, we’ve been working hard to make it better, broader, and more useful. Today we're introducing several new features that are the direct result of your feedback.

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.

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. Definitely take a look at the the source to get ideas for your own apps!

For more inspiration, also check out our firehose launch partners. Integrating with the firehose today are Collecta, Gnip, OneRiot, Postrank Analytics, and Superfeedr’s Track.

We’re making these new API features available starting today:

• Comments by the user - This feed consists of the activities the user has commented on.
• Likes by the user - The activities the user has liked are in this feed.
• Shared counts - This will return the number of times a specified URL has been shared across Google Buzz.

All of these features are documented in much more detail on the Google Buzz API documentation site and can be discussed on the Developer Forum. We will continue to innovate and iterate the Buzz API and encourage you to check out the new features and let us know what you think.

By John Panzer, Google Buzz Team

Towards a programmable web: PubSubHubbub for Google Alerts

Why shouldn't the web itself be programmable? A programmable web enables one application to be extended by another to create new applications that people haven't imagined before. This goes beyond mash-ups, which primarily combine data sources together into new views. A programmable web is reactive and relies on Web Hooks for event-driven notification, syncing, chaining, modification, and extension.

One simple example of programming the web itself is the post commit-hook on Project Hosting, which lets developers call their own web service every time someone commits to their repository. An advanced example is the Wave Robots API, which gives developers the power to enhance and modify the behavior of Wave in new ways that no-one has envisioned. The magic of this programmable approach is that these services come to *your* webapp whenever something requires attention; there's no need to poll for events or data that you're interested in.

In keeping with this goal of programmability, over the past few weeks we've enabled the PubSubHubbub protocol for many Google services, including FeedBurner, Reader shared items, and Blogger. This protocol provides web-hook notifications when Atom and RSS feeds are updated, delivering web applications near-real-time information about what's new or changed.

Today we're happy to announce that we have gone a step further and added PubSubHubbub support to Google Alerts. This gives developers the means to write web applications that process newly relevant search results as they become available. Think of it as an AJAX search API that tells *you* when it finds new results. Acting upon these notifications your app could update your website, email friends, send an SMS-- the possibilities are endless.

Like the huge number of Maps mash-ups out there, we hope to see a whole new class of applications built on top of these notifications. So give the protocol a try and tell us what you've built in our Google Group!

By Brett Slatkin, Google Developer Team