New Google Buzz API features, including a garden hose

AUG. 12, 2010

It’s been less than a month since our last launch, but we couldn’t sit still so today we’re announcing three new features. We think these will help developers create deeper, more engaging user experiences.

First, we wanted to make the firehose experience available to those who didn’t have the required server resources to support that amount of traffic. So we built a “garden hose” that’s a random sampling of public Google Buzz posts with a query rate that’ll come under the free quota limit for Google App Engine. As such, many more developers will be able to easily get their hands dirty on this great source of real-time data.

Second, we’ve created an API to return the people associated with a particular activity query. That is, you can now search for people who have recently created a public post that includes an arbitrary string or related geo-location. For example, if you wanted to see the people associated with Red Sox near Fenway Park, you could use this URL for the JSON response.

Third, we now enable users to discover and explore content related to a particular post. With this new API, developers can now access and deliver Google search results related to the topic of that post. For example, given this post about Coworking Day, you could add ‘/@related’ to the end of the self link to get this JSON response of related links. Cool, huh?

As always, these features are documented in more detail on the Google Buzz API documentation site. Please swing by the the Developer Forum and let us know what you think!

By Eric Steinlauf, Google Buzz Team

Photo credit: Nandhp, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.