Sending tweets to Buzz

1. In Buzz click on “X connected sites” next to your name

2. Click to “Add” Twitter, enter your Twitter handle

3. And you’re done

Now there is no authentication going on here, you are just telling Buzz to pull in all the tweet from the screen name you gave it.  You don’t have to enter your own, but why would you want someone else’s tweets in your Buzz feed?

Sending Buzz Posts to Twitter

This is a little more complicated, since Buzz currently does not authenticate to Twitter so it cannot tweet the Buzz Posts.  Enter your Google Profile RSS feed.  Notice how Google really pushed you to update that neglected profile page.  Well that’s because it is going to become the entry for others into your world of Buzz and beyond.

If you go to your Google Profile (mine is http://www.google.com/profiles/mark.pavlidis) you will see that it has an RSS feed (different browsers indicate it differently, but usually it is indicated at the right end of the address bar)

That RSS feed contains all of your Buzz Posts.  To push those Posts to Twitter you need to use a service that reads and RSS feed and pushes it to Twitter. There are many out there for automatically tweeting blog posts, etc.  Unfortunately not many provide the filtering you need to prevent and infinite loop of buzz-to-tweet-to-buzz-to-tweet-to-buzz-to (well you get the idea, think of the sound of feedback in a mic the last time you were at karaoke and multiply that by how bad the singing was = how annoying the loop would be).  Sorry to my followers, I found this out the hard way.

So how do you filter? Conveniently the Title of the Buzz posts indicate the source “Buzz by <your name> from Twitter”.  So what you need is a RSS to Twitter service that allows you to filter the keyword “Twitter” from the Title.  I tried several services but the only one I could get working correctly was dlvr.it.  Dlvr.it is currently in invite-only beta mode, so I am working on getting an invite code to share so you can set it up. Use invite code: BUZZ

dlvr.it lets you setup “routes” for your RSS feed to Twitter and Facebook.

Setting up dlvr.it

1. Copy your Google Profile RSS feed URL and use it as the route’s source

2. Configure your update settings and item options.  I prefix my items with “#buzz:” so my Twitter follower know where it is coming from. [dlvr.it guys, the Item Options ought to be in the Destination only and not also in the Source (redundant and confusing) Not so confusing after reading this, thx ^JP]

3. Filter out your tweets **** this is the most important step ***

4. Configure your Twitter destination.  Don’t tweet the title, just the body and a dlvr.it link.  Here is where you can also prepend or append text to the tweet.

Use the link so dlvr.it can show you metrics such as this:

Happy spreading your message to more people and annoying the @#$* out of people that follow you on both Buzz and Twitter.