Introducing the Google Buzz API
With
Google I/O
2010 finally upon us, what better time to introduce developers to the latest updates
to the
Google Buzz API?
As
announced
at the launch of Google Buzz, the Google Buzz API aligns itself with the
ever-growing family of freely available and community-developed protocols, formats, and
standards for sharing and consuming social content on the web, including ActivityStreams,
Atom, AtomPub, JSON, OAuth, PubSubHubbub, MediaRSS, PortableContacts, and more.
The Google Buzz API, a member of the
Google Code Labs, is very much a work in
progress — we intend to continue to iterate out in the open as we go along — and we hope the
features we are making available today will help inspire developers and provide a solid
foundation for new applications to be built.
We are already excited to
see developers who were helping us test the API deliver
terrific applications. Today you'll start
seeing the following sites and services integrate with Google Buzz:
End-users opt into using applications built
with the Google Buzz API via an interstitial confirmation screen outlining the application's
requested access scope (read-only, read/write, etc.). They can see which apps have access to
their data and can disable access at any time from the Google Accounts page, the Google
Dashboard, the “Buzz" tab in Gmail Settings, or from the app itself.
This initial iteration of the API includes support for fetching public per-user activity
feeds, fetching authorized and authenticated per-user activity feeds (both what the user
creates, and what they see), searching over public updates (by keyword, by author, and by
location), posting new updates (including text, html, images, and more), posting comments,
liking updates, retrieving and updating profiles and social graphs, and more. The best way to
get started is to dive right in and begin reading the
Google Buzz API developer
documentation.
There’s a lot more to come, and we expect to
keep moving quickly from here. But none of this would be possible without the hard work of
everyone participating in creating the protocols upon which Google Buzz is built, so we ask
and encourage developers to get involved with the communities behind
ActivityStreams,
OAuth, and the countless
others that we depend on.
And as with any young API, there will
undoubtedly be bugs and issues and places where we’ve deviated from what the specifications
say, or with what developers may expect. When you see something amiss, get confused by an
approach we’ve taken, or just want to comment on our progress, we invite you to update the
Buzz API issue
tracker and please join the conversation on the
developer forum.
With that, we’d like to welcome everyone to the first version of the
Google Buzz API. We can’t wait to see
what else we can build together.
By DeWitt Clinton, Google
Developer Team
