How to Use Google Buzz

13.02.2010

Already, a handful of Buzz add-ons to help you integrate Buzz into your social life have surfaced. Firefox users should check out , which lets you share your current Web page in Buzz via Gmail (useful if you want to keep your Google Reader shares separate from your Buzz shares.) Chrome users have , which adds a menu item that keeps tabs on your Buzz feed so that you don't have to keep checking back to the Gmail page. And WordPress users can add their buzzes to their WordPress blog with the sidebar widget.

You can peruse your Google Buzz feed just as you would read any other RSS feed by going to the URL http://buzz.googleapis.com/feeds/username/public/posted, where username is your Google account name. This is a feed of all your public buzzes, which can then appear in any application that can use RSS feeds--handy if you want to see buzzes in an RSS reader, for example.

Combine this feature with , a service that lets you use RSS feeds to publish in Facebook and Twitter, and you can get Google Buzz to publish your buzzes to Twitter. The arrangement isn't perfect--the RSS feed refreshes every 30 minutes--but considering that there's no native support for Buzz-to-Twitter publishing, it's worth trying out for now. You'll want to set TwitterFeed to post only the description, or you'll end up with a lot of tweets saying "Buzz from your username"; to do so, under Advanced Settings in the Create Feed page, set 'Post Content' to Include description only.