At PostRank we are continuously working on adding more activity stream sources to improve our coverage and to provide publishers with a complete view of how users across all kinds of different social networks engage with their content. So, when Google announced Buzz, we were really excited as it meant more social engagement data that we could integrate into our system.
To integrate Google Buzz into our system we had to manually crawl all of the public Google Profiles, identify the users who have opted in and shared their Buzz feeds, and then subscribe to their content. Thankfully, all of the Buzz feeds were PubSubHubbub enabled, which meant that Buzz would push the content to PostRank in real-time, but it was still a sub-optimal solution: PostRank could not guarantee that we would find all of the public Buzz feeds, and the subscription process imposed a high server tax for both sides. That is, until today!
With the launch of the full Buzz firehose, PostRank can now subscribe to just a single, aggregated, real-time PubSubHubbub feed – that’s about as simple as it gets. Perfect coverage, real-time data, and far less server resources consumed on both sides!
What does this mean for our users? If you’re an Analytics subscriber, then you will see greatly improved coverage of Google Buzz starting today: more users, more meta-data, and a more complete activity stream on your dashboard. And if you’re a user of our Data Services, RSS feeds, or API’s, then you will also undoubtedly benefit from the improved coverage of Buzz activity: more accurate engagement scores, and more accurate PostRank scores.
Big thanks to the Google team for releasing the firehose and inviting PostRank to be a launch partner for the new API!