San Francisco — Well, against all odds, Google Buzz is once again beginning to gain some momentum. The search engine Google has just uncovered a key data stream coming out of Google Buzz called “Firehose,” a new feature for the Buzz API that gives developers access to activities and content as its published, via a single syndication link, thus making it simple for App developers to incorporate public Google Buzz content into their websites and applications.
The Buzz API signals the first step to winning over the hearts of developers, the second step was cracking it completely open and offering a free Firehose API. Access to the so-called “Firehose” of Google Buzz data was activated Monday, Google announced in a blog post. Now people can really start making interesting buzz apps.
Twitter was the first to provide such an api. We can already view Twitter and Facebook streams in Google, Bing and Yahoo searches, as well as some thousands of websites too, which was only conceivable through their open API.
This initiative from Google might get Google buzz into the search engine stream as well along site Twitter and Facebook. Besides, this would enable developers to incorporate public Google Buzz content into their applications without having to go and find it: Google Buzz will just zap it directly to their apps through an API.
As far as Twitter’s case goes, any developer can access Twitter content through its own API, which has opened up a very dynamic market of desktop applications and other services that run atop the Twitter content. But access to the full breadth of Twitter content as it is published–dubbed the firehose–was quite the lucrative catch for Twitter: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are believed to have struck deals valued in the millions for access to Twitter content as it is published, and other partners have struck smaller deals.
Access to the Buzz Firehose appears to be free. Real-time search engine OneRiot is embedding the full feed of data from Google’s Buzz social sharing offerings to its results. Furthermore, Google Buzz’s new Firehose launched with four other partners: Collecta, Gnip, SuprFeedr and Postrank Analytics, and more information about how to implement the firehose can be found here.
Google is still striving to develop Buzz into a viable social-media competitor to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, the dominant microblogging services on the Internet. The company still has not indicated how many people are actually using the service, but it is not believed to be nearly as many as are on one or both of those services.