At launch, Google Buzz is not a Twitter client. As the team explained earlier this week, they have about a thousand things they could do with the product, but haven't yet, and sending updates from Buzz to external sites, like Facebook and Twitter, is absolutely on the list. But while Google's developers work on improvements for the much discussed social aggregation service, the developer of Reader2Twitter, initially designed to post shared items from Google Reader to Twitter, has upgraded his product to share native Buzz items as well.

As I highlighted back in September, I set up a new Twitter account solely for my shares from Reader, and now those items which I post directly to Buzz are included in that stream at http://www.twitter.com/lgstream (or @lgstream).



To share items from Buzz to Twitter:

1. Go to http://reader2twitter.appspot.com/buzz
2. Connect it to your Twitter account using OAuth
• (Of note, you need to go to http://reader2twitter.appspot.com/buzz after this, as the OAuth returns you to the URL without the Buzz directory)
3. Add your Google Profile Number ID (find it here at the bottom of the page by clicking "See other options")
4. Make sure "Sync" is On and hit Submit

Now, native updates you make from Buzz, and not those pulled in by 3rd party services, will be sent in near real-time, powered by Pubsubhubbub, to Twitter. Thus far, the vast majority of activity I have with Buzz is shared from other services, primarily Reader. But the two native posts I made to Buzz, once I synched with Reader2Twitter, made it to the @lgstream account. Example: Buzz item | Twitter item. I have been using Reader2Twitter for about five months now, and it is practically seamless. So long as the hub from Google is working, it's good to go. You can get started here: http://reader2twitter.appspot.com/buzz.

Internal code names for tech projects in Silicon Valley and beyond are a celebrated pastime - ranging from the predictable alphabetically-ordered release numbers to fanciful references to family members, vacation spots, animals or practically anything that doesn't actually describe the product itself. (See Apple code names or Microsoft code names for examples)

The code name for Google's new Buzz product? Taco Town. Not a grandiose reference to composers long since passed on, or beautiful vacation spots around the world, as other companies have done, but instead, an ode to good-tasting greasy food.

While Google obviously thought "Buzz" was a better name for their new aggregation play than Taco Town, despite archrival Yahoo! having used the name first, you can see tacos as part of today's launch, with a delicious-looking taco gracing the "Just the good stuff" description on the main Google Buzz page, and, throughout the many screenshots and demo video, the individual's name read as "Ted Taco".

If It's A Taco, It Must Be Good Stuff

The Notorious Ted Taco from Google Buzz
So where does Taco Town come from? Assuming Google didn't name it after one of the restaurants that dot the US, including establishments in Scottsbluff, Nebraska and Carthage, Missouri, the Taco Town name hearkens back to a satirical commercial from Saturday Night Live, called "Taco Town", where Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis and Andy Samberg go out for Mexican food, only to find their delicious dish to be a challenge, with layer upon salivating later being added to the entree.

The announcer, introducing the new taco at Taco Town, teases with his description:

"We take a crunchy, all-beef taco, smother it in nacho cheese, lettuce, tomato and our special southwestern sauce. Then we wrap it in a soft, flour tortilla with a layer of refried beans in-between..." adding on... "Then we wrap that in a savory corn tortilla with a middle layer of Monterey Jack cheese..." and later... "And it gets even awesomer, when we take a deep-fried gordita shell, smear on a little of our special "guacamolito" sauce and wrap that around the outside...", "But it gets even bigger! Because we bake it in a corn husk filled with pico de gallo, then then wrap that in an authentic Parisian crepe, filled with egg, gruyere, merguez sausage and Portobello mushroom...." followed by more layers including a Chicago style deep dish meat lovers pizza, rolled in a blueberry pancake, fried golden brown, and served with "spicy vegetarian chili".

As the faux commercial says, " It's 15 great tastes all rolled into one." You can see it embedded below, provided Hulu supports your country.


With one's social graph and social activity fractured asunder all over the Web, you can see why Google would want to roll all these great tastes together into one product, Buzz. The company also likely sees the difficulty in taking our many diverse activities, social graphs, and privacy concerns as different layers that must be combined to deliver a compelling offering.

Regardless of what Yahoo! and Microsoft might think about the new service, or its name, I think we can all agree it looks a lot better than "Google Taco Town".

The debut of Google's new social venture, Buzz, came with all the subtlety of a freight train. Like a freight train, you could hear the rumbling of Buzz as its launch approached, fueled by the vast array of open social tools that the company has been championing over the last few years, and a number of key hires that show Mountain View's commitment to making users' data portable and non-siloed, in visible contrast to alternative networks, most notably Facebook, who has made it notoriously difficult to export data in its six year history.

Though clearly a 1.0 version product today, Buzz is primed for significant improvement in the next several months, which will be driven by data measured within Google, gathering users' feedback - as they no doubt will be demanding the ability to share updates to downstream services, the introduction of an enterprise version, limited by domain, and other enhancements. But from the beginning, Buzz is built to be open.

"We are committed to open standards, and we want to build a non-siloed product at every turn," said Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management at Google on Monday. "You will see us take all these open standards, like Pubsubhubbub, Webfinger, Salmon, and use this as a vehicle to demonstrate to the world what it means to use them."

Buzz also fits in nicely with the Social Graph API being worked on by data portability pusher Brad Fitzpatrick, which also powers your Google Social Circle. While the social circle learns how many direct contacts you have in Google chat, and finds other connections through registered links, Buzz tracks your most frequent connections by e-mail and chat within Gmail, taking a step further and surfacing active "friend of a friend" content, should it be deemed relevant.

"Social media today is a fiefdom of friends," said Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google on Monday. "We believe your updates will go where you want them to. We are going to work hard to enable that."

Of note, despite the highly visible business development relationship forged by Google with Twitter to power the company's real-time search, Buzz simply taps Twitter's standard API to gain access to users' updates, and it is expected this access will be sufficient.

In addition to the morning's news that Google had launched Buzz as a major social push for Gmail, the company, in parallel, announced a new Web application for mobile devices, supporting both Android and iPhone platforms, that not only brings Buzz to the mobile phone, but also adds Buzz to the company's existing Maps application, showing Buzz from activity in your specific location. Leveraging the years of investments in Google Earth, Google Maps, Google StreetView and other location-based services, Google Buzz immediately ships with an advantage - determining the true identity of a location, beyond simple longitude and latitude coordinates.

As the much-hyped Foursquare and Gowalla applications have shown us over the last year, an individual's location is often as relevant as whatever activity is taking place. Google Buzz for mobile taps into the vast Earth, Maps and Street View database the company has been building over the last half-decade, and lets you post to Buzz with your update attached to the place where you are located, not just with a latitude/longitude coordinate, or even worse, an IP address.

"In the digital world, few have gotten this right," said Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google on Monday. "We don't want latitude/longitude, we want the colloquial term. We have solved this problem, of a conversation in a world of places, and mobile phones make it possible."

As Gundotra demoed to me at Google headquarters Monday on his Android-powered Google Nexus One handset, speaking into the phone made an automatic transcription, which could be posted to his Buzz, attached to the location he had selected. Tapping into Google's deep archives about places, establishments feature images of the location, details about that location, and relevant data, such as restaurant reviews, if applicable.

By selecting the "Nearby" option in his Buzz-enabled Maps application, Gundotra could also see what people were Buzzing about in the surrounding area.

The move to add geolocation is one trend that is growing for mobile applications and Twitter clients, although not many Twitter users have enabled such data sharing. If they do, and they pull their Tweets into Buzz, the product doesn't yet pull in that information to Mobile Maps, but it soon will, Gundotra promised.