Friday, May 20, 2011

An imperfect solution for feeding Google Buzz to Twitter

I've been experimenting with a way of feeding my Google Buzz stream to Twitter. There are a couple of services like Buzzcantweet and Buzz2twitter, which technically can do the job. However, they aren't fast enough for me. I'd prefer fast updates, or one I can force.

Something I had considered in the past was to feed the Buzz RSS to Twitter. Turns out that Feedburner can do this. The only problem is that it pings the source every 30 minutes, which doesn't work for me. I had given up until last night when a fellow geek posted his location from Buzz.

He said he was using feedburner. I checked it out again, in case a new feature was added. There wasn't a new feature, just the Socialize option that was there before. Then I thought about pinging Feedburner whenever there is an update. Of course, there is no ping control in Buzz.

But, I did find an option on Feedburner to ask it to update the feed manually. You can bookmark the link to force the update, which kicks in a Twitter post right away rather than waiting 30 minutes for an automatic polling.

It's not perfect; but it's good enough for me. Even if I forget to force an update, Feedburner will check in 30 minutes.

The reason this is so important to me is that I prefer to work in Google Buzz. I may on occasion go over 8 posts in 30 minutes, an update maximum for Feedburner. By forcing an update, I can ensure that all my updates are posted. It also allows me to tweet from Google Talk on my Android devices. Talk feeds status updates into Buzz through Latitude.

It's a bit of a labyrinth; it works for me.

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