Saturday, February 13, 2010

Link Google Buzz to Twitter

There are several reasons why I am in love with Google Buzz right now. First off, it’s right under my Gmail inbox for me to conveniently click on without having to open up a new tab in my browser and type in facebook/myspace/twitter/etc.com. Following/unfollowing people is dead simple, and Buzz status-based (as opposed to look-at-my-pictures-from-my-vacation-to-Australia! based), which more or less guarantees that my buzz feed is full of fantastically interesting content. And finally, it’s fast. Really fast – not bloated like Facebook, and (afaik) without the intermittent server crashes that plague Twitter.

That said, Buzz could be better. It could stop showing updates in my email inbox, for starters (@Apple interns: Numerous?!?! In my work email?!?! :D ). And it could also hook itself up to my Twitter account using OAuth. …somehow.

But until that happens, I’ve been using twitterfeed.com to push updates to Twitter every 30 minutes. The process, if you’re interested, is pretty simple:

  • Get public Google buzz feed link here: http://buzz.googleapis.com/feeds/[your username]/public/posted
  • Sign in using your OpenID (aka your gmail account)
  • Go to Dashboard, click on “Create new feed”
  • Add your Google buzz feed link into the RSS Feed URL in step 1. Click on Advanced, set your feed to publish description only under “Post Content”. I also set publish time to 30mins, which is faster than the default.
  • Authenticate your twitter account for twitterfeed in Step 2.
  • Continue until finish, and voila, you’re all set!

It’s not a perfect solution, but until Google comes up with its own system, or a better alternative presents itself, it works. :)

[Via http://cysuen.wordpress.com]

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