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Google Buzz has been out for a couple of days now. It certainly seems to be getting a lot of attention, personally speaking it looks a lot more active than Twitter was when I first joined it. There is quite a bit of scope to link accounts to Buzz from the off, I’ve already got my blogs, Flickr, Twitter and Youtube posting to it. However at the moment it is all one way. What if you want your posts on Buzz to go back to Twitter?

Well for starters, looking at the API, it looks like that will come soon. However for now I have come up with a way of doing it to some extent. An existing service that has been pulled in to become part of Buzz was Google Profiles. This now has your Buzz posts on it. Usefully though, it also has an RSS feed (okay, an Atom feed), containing your Buzz posts. See my Google Profile for an example, once you’re there, in Firefox click on the blue RSS icon in the address bar, and you should get the option to subscribe to the page (depending on your settings). This will give you the URL for that page.

So, go to your own profile page, grab the RSS feed URL, and then go over to Twitterfeed.com. Create an account there, set it up to use your Google Profile feed, and after a delay of a few hours, it will start posting your Buzz posts onto Twitter.

Provisos are:
1) Obviously Twitter has a much shorter character limit, so your posts may potentially get cut short
2) If you set a post limit in Twitterfeed, it will only take the first x posts you’ve made.
3) It is only your posts, no comments
4) You’ll not get any of the other data such as location etc.
5) It does seem a little flaky thus far, there is potentially for tuning a bit how Twitterfeed changes the post to get it on Twitter, but not lots of options.

A proper integrated solution within Buzz will probably fix all of these, but it will do for now.

A quick chat on twitter today turned into a rather large comment on Ben Werdmuller’s blog. Ben had written about how game dynamics, such as the scoring mechanism used by Foursquare, gets involvement from its users in a competitive sense, and wondered if that could be applied to open source development. This got me thinking, and I suggested how it could drive a very general question and answers application. Go over there and have a look.

A couple of interesting but not unexpected developments today, first Bing announced it was including real-time Twitter updates in its searches(this doesn’t look that live yet), then a few hours later Google announced the same.

Real-time updates have been coming from a few directions in the past few months. There has been a little buzz about PubSubHubBub and to a lesser extent RSSCloud, both of which look to extend RSS (or in RSSCloud’s case take advantage of what was in RSS 2.0 already), and these can be used to provide real-time updates from blogs to RSS readers and to search engines.

Then came the public beta of Google Wave. Wave is many different things, but one of the main parts is messaging and collaboration in real time. You can see collaborators typing letters in real time, and can also publish a wave on a site outside of the interface, so it can be see by others at the same time.

Another example in the real-time space is OneRiot, who are building a real-time search engine. Their index only goes back one day at present, they try to index only the current content about any topic, using a combination of tracking member behaviour and monitoring Facebook, Digg and Twitter.

The movement seems to be at the moment to speed up the flow of information from web sites and social networks into the tools we use, whether that is a search engine, a web site, a blog or a social network. Lots of small pieces are starting to come together to form a larger whole. It is a refinement of existing technologies rather than a revolution, perhaps nothing that would merit the annoyance of the tag Web 3.0, but it is interesting to see this movement starting to form into results over the past few months.

Well, I’ve been running the new iPhone 3.0 software update for a whole 3 hours now. What have I learned thus far?

Firstly, it is that Apple can’t handle everyone updating their phones at once. The update is of course delivered via iTunes, and it’s pretty much acting as if it was a self-inflicted DOS attack on the iTunes store. It’s timing out constantly, letting you in occasionally. Which is a bit frustrating if you’re trying to use the store in general. It’s very worrying if your phone appears to be blank because it hasn’t yet been authorised by iTunes (it has already, but for some reason it needs it again for this update). Oh well. I guess Apple will learn their lesson from this one, as it has to shaft their sales on iTunes for the day quite nastily.

Okay, so having passed through that hurdle, I got it up and running, and tried sending my first iPhone MMS. I’ve been waiting for this feature for a while, seeing as I had it on every one previously for the past few years. The interface for doing this is really nice, just click the camera button, and if you’re happy with your shot, it will put it as a thumbnail into the flow of the conversation. However it then turned out you have to wait for O2 here in the UK to turn it on. It failed a couple of times, then a little while later I got a couple of texts from them to say “it won’t work until we turn it on for you”,”okay, we’ve turned it on” (Got a tip from @jturnbull that this would happen when I was moaning about it on Twitter, which was most appreciated). Sent it again after this, and it worked fine.

That’s the moaning part of the post over now. What else? Well, it’s a few little things thus far. I’m a big podcast listener, so I was impressed to find a new little feature they’ve added, which is for podcasts only (not ordinary music tracks). You can now play them at half or double speed. The double speed could be useful for talk podcasts, as it seems to still be a sensible understandable pace, so you could speed-listen if you want. As someone who occasionally gets massive backlogs of listening, this could be rather handy for me.

Spotlight, a search feature from Mac OS that has been added to the iPhone, works beautifully. Just scroll left from your home page, and start typing. It’s searching and finding words in my email very quickly, and it is something I see me using a lot. Cut and Paste works fine. And the new voice recording application is nice, saves files to the phone, lets you email them to people, and they also show up in your phone folders on iTunes. It is a bit quiet though, be prepared to talk fairly loudly. It just isn’t as powerful a mic as say the N95 has (which if you’re so inclined, and I’m not, is a boon for concert bootlegging).

Finally for now, you can sync Notes to iTunes. However what you don’t seem to be able to then do is to find them on your computer. Which is kind of the point of syncing them (okay I lied a little about the moaning ending). I seem to recall that they may add something proper to handle this in Mac OSX Snow Leopard, but they maybe could even have just added something in iTunes for now.

So it’s not a bad start, couple of frustrations, some nice little twizzly bits to keep me occupied. However I’m not really expecting too much to begin with, as the real meat of the 3.0 update is in what it offers developers. Lots of potential in that, and that potential will start to be realised over the following weeks and months as developers start to both update their existing applications and write new ones that take advantage of the expanded feature set on offer.

Great little tip, lets you add notes into Evernote from Twitter (from Lifehacker)

Have had a little fun tonight following Stephen Fry on Twitter. Following this tweet:

Ok. This is now mad. I am stuck in a lift on the 26th floor of Centre Point. Hell’s teeth. We could be here for hours. Arse, poo and widdle

he posted a picture of his predicament to Twitpic:

There then followed a deluge of tweets with the hashtag of #frylift, and even some cash-in merchandise:

Okay that was me. My favourite was from Father Ted co-creator Graham Lineham who called for help:

Help! I’m stuck halfway up the stairs!

and also provided a photo:

Happily both Stephen and Graham were rescued and are now safe. This should say something about Twitter, given the numbers of posts and views involved, but I think more than anything it says it is a load of wonderful silly nonsense at times.

Spamming Twitter User

There are so many reasons in that single image as to why I did not return this user’s follow…

Having had an iPhone 3G for a few months now, I had noticed that it seemed to learn words after you had typed them out a few times, adding them to the dictionary for that phone. I had even wondered if there was a way to get those words directly into the dictionary, but presumed it would probably be protected and tricky to do. Hackszine points out that there is a nice simple way to do it, simply type the words you want into notes a few times, until the word is learnt:

Hackszine.com: Train your iPhone’s dictionary

It is said that Twitter may be discussed by Jonathon Ross and Stephen Fry on Ross’s chat show, tonight on BBC1. If it is mentioned (and we don’t know it will be, that could have been edited out), it could be the point that Twitter really takes off massively in the UK. I’ll predict if they do, watch out for a load of new people this weekend.

This is what happens when you doubletap on the iPhone home button…
Hidden features of the iPhone button | creativebits