Google Buzz and Salmon

You may have heard of a small launch this morning:  Google Buzz is being rolled out to all GMail users right now.

There's an obvious connection to the Salmon Protocol; DeWitt just put up a blog post giving the big picture for Buzz and open protocols on the Social Web blog, and technical details on the Google Code blog from Brian Stoler. Most importantly, there's a Labs Buzz API.  Here's the take-away:

We'd like to take this opportunity to invite developers to join us as we prepare the Google Buzz API for public launch. Our goal is to help create a more social web for everyone, so our plan for the Buzz API is a bit unconventional: we'd like to finalize this work out in the open, and we ask for your participation. By building the Google Buzz API exclusively around freely available and open protocols rather than by inventing new proprietary technologies, we believe that we can work together to build a foundation for generations of sites to come. We're ready to open the doors and share what we've been working on, and we'd like for you to join us in reaching this goal. - Join the Conversation

This is one of the motivations behind Salmon as an open, non-proprietary, standards-based, and interoperable protocol.  This goes two ways:

1. Since Buzz can pull in feed based data from anywhere, we want Buzz comments and likes on that data to flow back upstream to sources like Flickr and blog posts.
2. As services consume the public Buzz streams, we want to make it easy for them to also send salmon back upstream to Buzz as well.

And of course we plan to do this in an way that's decentralized and isotropic, with no most favored site. Buzz is no more central than any other service that talks the necessary protocols.  Come join us on the Buzz API Group to talk more about Buzz and how it's leveraging open, decentralized standards.