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How Google Buzz is Disruptive: Open Data Standards

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Google rolled out a social stream service today called Buzz.

It looks on the surface like Facebook, FriendFeed and other stream reading and writing services. It will compete with Facebook and Twitter. Under the covers, though, this major product was built by a team of people taking a radical new approach to online publishing:
Buzz is all about open, standardized user data.

Google Buzz data can be syndicated out to other services using the standard data formats called Atom, Activity Streams, MediaRSS and PubSubHubbub. That couldn't be more different from Facebook. Google has taken open data standards to battle against a marketplace of competitors that are closed and proprietary to varying degrees. This is a very big deal.

Google Buzz was presented as a destination site, but a look at its APIs and developer roadmap indicate that it may actually intend to be a platform - the central hub for a world of distributed social networking. “This is a downpayment on where we're going with the open, social web," Google Open Web Advocate Chris Messina told us.

It's tempting to recoil at the thought of Google powering one more part of our lives online, and our friends' activity streams are a very important part of the online experience now. But if the growing number of data portability and open web advocates the company has hired can do their jobs well - then Google Buzz could be a big force for good.

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