Take two cups of Facebook share, add a spoonful of twitter and two quarts of no respect for peoples privacy and you’ll get Google Buzz.
How to Generate a Google Buzz Button for WordPress.com?
I’ve added a new feature to GetSocial Live: you can now use it to generate Google Buzz buttons for your WordPress.com blog!
Try It (It’s alpha transparent and will work on all types of backgrounds):
The button is routed through Google Reader. it’s a temporary solution until a better API for Google Buzz becomes available. Get yours now!
For the best results, you should use your permalink (instead of shortlink) when you generate Google Buzz buttons. The reason for this is that the source of the link is extracted from your post URL. If you’ll use the shortlink GetSocial will not be able to extract the name of your blog. Instead, it will assign WordPress.com as the source for your link (the link itself will work fine, and correctly connect to your post though).
For regular updates and status reports follow GetSocial Live on Twitter.
What is Google Buzz?
Google Buzz is a new service from Google. it was launched a few days ago, and is probably intended to compete with twitter. You can post text and images there, comment, ‘like’ and follow/unfollow people. It’s a hybrid between the Facebook share feature (which automatically fetches images and other information from your posted links) and Twitter (excluding its famous 140 characters limitation).
What’s Wrong With Google Buzz?
Google Buzz was integrated into Gmail, so it’s already got a huge user base. That’s also one of my problems with it – I think that Google Buzz is imposing itself on Gmail users, and that’s just ain’t right. Also, many Gmail users found themselves ‘following’ (and being ‘followed’ by) random people who Google Buzz have automatically selected from their email contacts. This was done without them even using the new service! That’s bad for privacy, and also not particularly fun – do you really want to find out that you’ve been “following” your ex?
But wait, it gets even worse: since you can click through to other people’s profiles and see who they follow and who follows them, you can (at least in this early stage) deduce who they’ve been exchanging emails with – and again, that’s without them even using the service! I’ve personally found out the secret identity of an anonymous blogger using this method.
The thing that really amazes me about Google Buzz though, is its name. What’s going on here? Doesn’t Yahoo already have a service called Yahoo Buzz? Am I the only one to notice that? ‘Like’? ‘Follow’? I think we’ve seen all this stuff somewhere else already…
In my opinion Google Buzz, like GTalk and Google Wave before it, was designed to keep you connected to your Google account for as much as possible so that Google could phish (and keep, forever) even more personal information about your browsing habits and use it for targeting ads. But hey, that’s just me.
PERMALINK / SHORTLINK
That’s what SHE said!