Yesterday, while Google Buzz was still only a rumor, I felt that there was a slight likelyhood that Google’s entry into the microblogging field would support decentralized interoperability using the OpenMicroBlogging protocol pioneered by the Status.net open source micro messaging platform. I was wrong about that, but it was quite a long shot… Speculation is a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it !
I am also surprised that there is no Twitter API, but there is plenty of other protocols on the menu that should keep us quite happy. There is already the Social Graph API, the PubSubHubbub push protocol and of course Atom Syndication and the RSS format – with the MediaRSS extension. But much more interesting is the Google Buzz documentation mention that “Over the next several months Google Buzz will introduce an API for developers, including full/read write support for posts with the Atom Publishing Protocol, rich activity notification with Activity Streams, delegated authorization with OAuth, federated comments and activities with Salmon, distributed profile and contact information with WebFinger, and much, much more“. So with all that available to third parties we may even be able to interact with Google’s content without having to deal with Gmail whose rampant portalization makes me dislike it almost as much as Facebook and Yahoo.
I’m particularly excited about Salmon, a protocol for comments and annotations to swim upstream to original update sources. For now I wonder about the compared utilities of Google Buzz and FriendFeed, but once Salmon is widely implemented it won’t matter where the comments are contributed : they will percolate everywhere and the conversation shall be united again !