GMAIL USERS: We hope you’ll join the discussion over on Mashable’s Google Buzz account.

We’ve discussed how you can integrate Buzz with your other social networks, but what about integrating Buzz with your blog? If you use a self-hosted WordPress blog (sorry, WordPress.com users), there are already a variety of Google Buzz plugins and add-ons available.

While it’s clear that people are really taking to using Buzz to share content and communicate, the service will undoubtedly reach more users as its sharing tools are integrated into other social sites. From buttons to social stream in your side bar, here’s how you can integrate Buzz with your WordPress blog.

Google Buzz Buttons

Mashable started sporting some nifty Buzz buttons a few days ago and lots of our readers have wanted to know how to add a similar feature to their own blogs. As it stands right now, how our Google Buzz buttons work (and how the buttons other sites are using also work) is that they create a share link from that post to Google Reader. As long as Google Reader is connected with your Google Buzz account, your publicly shared items will also be shared on Buzz.

Already, a number of enterprising WordPress plugin developers have answered the call to add Google Buzz buttons to WordPress posts.

Let’s take a look:

Google Buzz Button

Internet Techies created the Google Buzz Button plugin that allows you to add a “Buzz This” button to each of your WordPress posts. That icon probably looks pretty familiar — that’s because the button was designed here at Mashable (though it isn’t the same plugin).

The plugin options are relatively limited — you can choose what “rel” attribute you include with the link (the default is “nofollow”) and you can choose to display the button before or after your post content. You can also specify the icon’s height and width. Making some changes to your WordPress theme’s CSS options, you could further customize the appearance of the button, but as it stands, it’s a pretty basic (and easy) way to add a Buzz button. If you want to add Buzz manually to only certain posts, there is a template tag that you can add to those posts.

WP Google-buzz

Another button plugin option is WP Google-buzz from Arpit Shah. This button is extremely similar to the Google Buzz Button plugin, but it adds a few more options. You can choose to show the button before or after content or to add it to posts manually, but there are also options for what style button you want to use. Depending on how you have your blog setup, you might want to use a different size or style of button.

WPBuzzer

Hameedulah’s WPBuzzer is the most robust of the Google Buzz button plugins as of right now. The style of the button is almost identical to what Mashable and the Google Buzz Button use (albeit, not quite as clean), but the options are where this plugin really shines.

You can choose where you want your buttons to appear (on posts, on pages, on the home page, in your RSS feed), whether your want the button to appear before or after the post, the target for the button (a new window or a pop-up share option) and even the CSS style. You can also choose to use a small or large button.

The biggest feature is that you can track share counts (just like we do at Mashable) if you have a Bit.ly API key and login.

Light Social

The Light Social plugin takes a slightly different approach to the Google Buzz button. Light Social is a plugin that inserts a set of social share links at the bottom of each of your WordPress posts. This way links to Digg, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are all automatically at the bottom of the post. The developer of Light Social updated the plugin to include a Google Buzz icon and share link as well. If you want to add lots of social options to your posts — Light Social is a good approach.

Buzz In Your Sidebar

It’s one thing to let other people share your content to their buzz accounts, but a big advantage of Buzz is that you can aggregate your social activities into one place as well. Check out these options for adding some Buzz to your sidebar!

Google Buzz ER

If you want to share your Buzz content on your blog, check out the Google Buzz ER plugin. Google Buzz ER is extremely cool. It’s a widget that will display your public Buzz content. Just enter in your username and define how many Buzz entries you want to display and drag the widget to your designated choice in your blog.

That’s it! Now you have Buzz in your sidebar! Plus, as an added benefit, other users can click on “comment” to immediately respond to what you share. As of right now, the Buzz API doesn’t allow other people’s comments to become viewable, so only your public content is going to appear on your blog.

BuzzCounter.net

Another option for adding a Buzz widget to your blog (WordPress or otherwise) is BuzzCounter.net. Just fill in your username and you can generate the JavaScript to paste onto your website or blog!

Buzz Your Comments

There are a number of different all-inclusive comment solutions for WordPress — there’s Echo, Disqus (which we use here at Mashable) and IntenseDebate. IntenseDebate is owned by Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com and some of the main contributors to the WordPress.org project. So it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s the first of the solutions to offer Buzz integration into its service.

If you use IntenseDebate on your blog, you can now easily add a Buzz It button to the top of your comment form. This won’t let people Buzz their own comments (we expect something like that will come in the future), but it adds another “Share on Buzz” option for your post to your visitors. If you use IntenseDebate, you can activate the Google Buzz This plugin by enabling it in the Plugins Directory.

Keep Your Eyes Peeled

As Google Buzz continues to evolve (remember, it isn’t even a week old), more and more integration options are going to sprout up. Let us know what sort of integration options you’d like to see in the future in the comments! If we missed one of your favorite Buzz plugins, let us know!

Tags: buzz, Google, google buzz, how to, List, Lists, Wordpress, wordpress plugins

There are a lot of players vying to become your gateway to rest of the web: Facebook Connect, OpenID, Sign In With Twitter, MySpace ID, and Google Friend Connect just to name a few. It’s Facebook Connect however that seems to be leaving all of the other connect methods in the dust. This includes Google Friend Connect, which without a major social network to back it has floundered in terms of adoption.

Google’s not about to hand over this potentially vital market over to Facebook, however. A few weeks ago, the company simplified the Friend Connect implementation process. Today, the search engine giant has introduced an array of new features that allow users to get to know each other by adding interests, adding the ability to send private messages, and more.

The first part of the new features revolves around what boils down to social networking. For example, site owners can use Friend Connect to ask their visitors about their favorite activities and use that data to help connect people with similar tastes. It also gives the site owner a lot of valuable data.

The other part of the announcement really focuses on getting website owners to adopt Friend Connect. Google touts new options such as building custom newsletters, creating gadgets and links that target the interests of every user, and improving the relevancy of Google ads. The company can launch all the user-based features it wants, but without site owners adopting, it won’t matter.

The push by Google is smart, but Facebook’s built-in social advantage is something the search giant just cannot beat. Leveraging the data and log-ins of 300+ million users is Facebook’s huge advantage, and unless Google can find a way to parry that, these new features, while welcomed, may not help spur a new wave of adoption.

If you want to learn more, Google has created a new overview video of Google Friend Connect which explains both the basics and the new features:

Join the Mashable Google Friend Connect Community

You can join our Frend Connect community using the widget below!

Tags: friend connect, Google, google friend connect

Ning, the popular online service that allows users to create their own custom social networking sites, launched Ning Apps today. Ning Apps gives users the ability to embed over 90 new apps and widgets on their social networks. Given that Ning Apps is based on the OpenSocial standard, however, developers will surely create a lot more apps in the near future. Ning added basic OpenSocial support to its service last year. At that time, however, Ning only supported about 30 applications and users could only add OpenSocial applications to their own profiles but could not publish them on their network sites so that everybody could see them.

Sponsor

Now, Ning Network Creators – that is, users who administer their own social network on Ning – can finally embed these apps and make them available for all the users on their custom social network. Among the apps launched today are a service that allows artists to sell merchandise from Sellit, a BlogTalkRadio app for podcasters, Huddle workspaces, PollDaddy polls, as well as WordPress apps to display blog posts and a Ustream app for live video streaming. A complete list of existing apps is available here.

While other social networks have obviously provided their users with access to these kinds of apps and widgets for a long time already, this is a major step forward for Ning. Ning, according to its own stats, currently hosts over 1.5 million different social networks (how many of these are active is a different question, however) and has about 33 million registered users. If Ning wants to continue to compete with Facebook and other social networks, it simply needs this kind of open development environment to provide its users with the right set of features, though it also looks like Ning actually has an Apple-like approval process for new apps in place.

Discuss

How did an interview recorded 40 years ago win a 2009 Emmy? We have a long gestation time, YouTube, and peace to thank, reports the Observer.

In 1969, then 14-year-old Jerry Levitan made his way to John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto, elbowed a long line of press out of the way and somehow convinced the famous Beatle to give him a 40-minute interview. The conversation made its way from reel-to-reel tape to an animated short almost 4 decades later and was posted to YouTube in 2007.

Created with director and animator Josh Raskin and illustrator James Braithwaite, the 5-minute animation was originally developed to be included on DVD with Mr. Levitan’s book, I Met the Walrus: How One Day With John Lennon Changed My Life Forever. Since being posted to YouTube the short won Best Animation at the Manhattan Short Film Festival and was nominated for a 2008 Academy Award.

This year, I Met the Walrus went up against an “All My Children” video podcast, the New York Times Style Magazine screen tests and other notable nominations to win the “New Approaches – Daytime” award at the 36th Annual Creative Arts Emmy Awards.

The animated short features audio footage from the interview as its soundtrack, with Lennon imparting messages about peace being in the hands of the people even in a time of war. Its visual style is wonderfully playful, intelligently cartoonish and stylistically appropriate to the subject, being almost reminiscent of some of Lennon’s own illustrative work from his published works.

Check out the video below and let us know what you think. Is the film and its attendant story about an unlikely meeting between a teenager and the then biggest star in the world worth its accolades? Do you think I Met the Walrus succeeds, as Jerry Levitan hoped, “something that I thought John would love”?

I Met the Walrus

Image courtesy of Roy Kerwood

Tags: animation, Emmys, john lennon, the beatles, youtube

WordPress, one of the world’s most used blogging tools and publishing platforms, has reached Version 2.8 today. Go ahead and download it!

Highlights of this release:

• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
• Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

New User Features:

• New Theme Installer routines
• Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
• Add Documentation(function) lookup to Theme and Plugin editors
• Use “Custom Header” for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
• Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
• Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
• Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
• Don’t notify post author of own comments
• Fix comment paging for static front page
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
• Make titles into links in Dashboard Right Now module (this was in 2.7.1)
• Improved Admin icons (grey-to-transparent shadows)
• Update Blue Admin Color Scheme
• Press This improvements UI, quoting fixes, plus ability for Contributors to use Press This
• Add a Cancel Upload button and a Delete link to Administration > Media > Add New
• Add column “Rating” in Administration > Links > Edit
• Improve installer to help people entering wrong email addresses
• Improved Widget user interface
• Allow editing of all plugin files (Ticket 6732)
• Improved Plugin search (this was in 2.7.1) on Administration > Plugins > Add New
• Per Page option for plugins
• Move “Install a plugin in .zip format” to new Upload tab under Administration > Plugins > Add New
• Show absolute date instead of relative date for scheduled posts
• Fix tags suggest for post quick edit and bulk edit
• Permalink editor changes and fix for pages
• Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
• Add toggle all button to the Gallery tab in the uploader
• Support more than one gallery on the same page
• Add per page option to Screen Options for comments, posts, pages, media, categories, and tags
• Overhaul of LiveJournal importer (also add define WP_IMPORTING)
• Import category descriptions for Administration > Tools > Import > WordPress
• Show Tools menu for all users so they can access Turbo
• Check for new version when visiting Administration > Tools > Upgrade
• In upgrade process, provide better explanation for database upgrade message
• Fix most popular link category list
• Add description field for tags
• WAI-ARIA landmark roles to added to WordPress Default theme
• “Choose a city in the same timezone as you” for Timezone in Administration > Settings > General
• Remove My Hacks option from Administration > Settings > Miscellaneous
• Hide email addresses from low privilege users on Administration > Comments
• Allow case-insensitive logins
• Login and Registration pages noindex followed
• Give login screen proper iPhone viewport
• Enforce unique email addresses in Add/Edit users
• Make user_nicenames unique during registration
• Add “Send this password to the new user by email” option to Administration > Users > Add New
• Don’t set user’s Website url to http:// in Administration > Users > Add New
• Add password strength meter to Add User and Edit User
• Hide things that need to be available to screen readers via offscreen positioning
• Use invisible class for hiding labels and legends
• Use a semantic class name for text targeted to screen readers

Features that did not make it into Version 2.8:

• Some default shortcodes, maybe the most popular 10 from WordPress.com
• oEmbed support, tied in with shortcodes
• Better UI for post revisions, maybe an optional field to say what changed in a version
• OAuth support
• GeoData for posts, comments, attachments, etc.
• Template tags to do everything the custom gallery on ma.tt does
• Menu editor
• Unbalanced tags across more and nextpage tags (Ticket 6297)
• Sitemaps by default
• Refresh of the importers (LiveJournal was refreshed)
• Gallery post_type
• Versioning of template edits
• Documentation links for functions used in currently edited template
• MPTT (Modified Preorder Tree Traversal) for hierarchies

The complete (and much, much more exhaustive list) is available at WordPress.org. We are going to try the update on our various personal blogs and push it out to The Next Web in the next days. As Boris said in the comments: The Next Web is now running on WordPress 2.8. Took some 30 seconds to update!

In a few minutes Facebook will become the biggest example of a social network that allows users to log-in with OpenID credentials granted to them by other companies’ websites. Major networks have said for months that their ID could be used as OpenID, but becoming “relying parties” that accepted OpenID from elsewhere was the step everyone was waiting for. The dam has broken.

It’s ironic that it’s Facebook that did it. Facebook is probably the most closed of all the major social networks (other than LinkedIn) and is so far ahead of everyone else in market share that traditional logic would argue that they have no interest in this kind of interoperability. This is the kind of step that was expected from networks more open and, frankly, far behind Facebook. Nevertheless, it has happened and it’s big news.

Sponsor

New Facebook users will now be able to create Facebook accounts using their Gmail credentials and existing users will be able to associate and thus log in with Gmail or any other OpenID account that supports “automatic login.”

That means fewer passwords to remember. Just log in with your favorite OpenID supporting account and don’t worry about one just for Facebook. Single sign on is just the simplest benefit though.

Presumably, the friends you bring with you in your OpenID account will be searched for automatically on Facebook. “In tests we’ve run,” the company said today, “we’ve noticed that first-time users who register on the site with OpenID are more likely to become active Facebook users. They get up and running after registering even faster than before, find their friends easily, and quickly engage on the site.”

Contact lists are the second simplest benefit of this kind of data portability, but other payloads are possible and that’s when it gets even more exciting. We’ll see what Facebook does to move the ball even further up the court.

Nothing is live yet and we haven’t been able to test out usability (we just got a press release about the forthcoming announcement at 1:30 PM PST, which is latehere.), but Facebook is very good about things like that and has been working with the OpenID community on usability (its biggest challenge) for months.

Expect MySpace, Digg, Twitter and maybe some Yahoo sites to start accepting OpenID from other companies by the end of this summer at the latest. It’s only a matter of time now that Facebook has.

Note: Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch argues otherwise:

“Facebook has really been a relying party since its inception – there’s never been a “Facebook ID” because you’ve always used your university Email (or more recently, your personal Email) to log in. So the site isn’t really sacrificing anything by enabling OpenID support. The likes of Google and Microsoft have built many services tied to their own proprietary accounts, and they’re going to be far more hesitant to give those up.”

We can see some strong logic here, but we also suspect there will be additional factors that emerge, like an increasing number of websites deciding to become OpenID providers so their user data can be used in Facebook, that will keep the current flowing in this direction.

Discuss

As expected since yesterday, Facebook has launched the Open Stream API, which lets third-party developers use Facebook’s activity stream inside their own applications and services.

Developers will be able to filter and remix the stream – consisting of status updates, photos, videos, notes, as well as likes and comments on all the above – as they see fit. They will also be able to create content directly in the streams; for example, an application will be able to change the user’s status update.

Such an open approach did wonders for Twitter, and it means that we can soon expect hundreds of new applications developed for Facebook. We’ll see advanced applications like Tweetdeck applied to Facebook. For many advanced, tech-savvy users, Facebook’s homepage will become obsolete as they move on to applications that offer even more options. It also means that Facebook will get even more free PR as all these new applications start hitting the mailboxes of technology oriented blogs.

All of this will, however, work only for users who give the individual application access to their stream. From the official documentation (emphasis mine):

“Instead of prompting your users for the status_update, photo_upload, video_upload, create_note, and share_item extended permissions, you can simply prompt them for the publish_stream extended permission, and that single permission lets your users update their statuses, upload photos and videos, write notes, and share links all from your application or site.”

Twitter does not have this restriction, and although it probably won’t stop developers from creating applications on the Open Stream API, ultimately it will always mean that all these applications aren’t perfect; i.e., they don’t necessarily deliver all the data you see on Facebook itself.

Beta partners include Adobe, which has created a stream Notifier, and Seesmic Desktop, an advanced Twitter and Seesmic AIR desktop client (and the successor of Twhirl), which now also includes Facebook support, but this latest version is not yet publicly available (some details can be found here however).

More Facebook Resources from Mashable:

- 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page

- 5 Tips for Optimizing Your Brand’s Facebook Presence

- New Facebook Pages: A Guide for Social Media Marketers

- HOW TO: Survive the New, New Facebook

- 30+ Apps for Doing Business on Facebook

Tags: facebook, Open Stream API, twitter

Google has announced that the company now offers a secure way for third party websites to access any user’s list of friends, with their permission, and based on a proposed new industry standard. No more giving away your GMail password and then having random services you want to try go into your account and scrape the information there.

Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.

Sponsor

According to the Portable Contacts website:

we’re seeing major Internet companies making contacts APIs available, such as Google’s GData Contacts API, Yahoo’s Address Book API, and Microsoft’s Live Contacts API (with more to come). Not surprisingly though, each of these APIs is unique and proprietary. We believe this creates the ideal conditions for developing a common, open spec that everyone can benefit from.

Why is This Important?

The social web works best when it’s truly social. New applications that use social sharing can be much more useful when new users can port in their existing network of friends and see who they know is already using a site. That’s much better than starting cold.

These types of standardized approaches to passing that data are secure (that’s good) and allow developers to write code once to use all the supporting sources of data. You’ve heard the old illustration about railroads? When all the railroads in the US accepted a standard size of rail, all the trains were able to travel much farther than ever before. That’s where we’re headed with all this information on the web. When we give it standard methods of transport, it can go further and do more than ever before.

That’s a pretty big deal and it’s fantastic that Google has moved to support the Portable Contacts standard. Hopefully sometime soon everyone will and then we’ll wonder what took the web so long to enable social interoperability.

Discuss

With 30 million individual iPhone’s sold, 25000 applications available for download and with over 50,000 developers – Apple have created an incredible platform in record time.

Apple’s latest round of updates have seen an immense number of notable improvements and features.

Let’s go through the new features, grab a coffee…this may take a while.

Cut, Copy and Paste
You can also copy and paste web content as well as regular text you might be typing. If you didn’t mean to paste something, shake your phone in order to Undo (or Redo) your paste.

MMS
You can send and receive Photos right over the network. Contacts (VCard). Audio files. Or your location. No word about video yet though.

Mail Search
You can now search inside all of the major default iPhone applications, including Mail. In Mail you can also search email now downloaded, i.e. still on your server!

Email Multiple Photos
You can now send multiple photos by tapping the action button, selecting a bunch of photos, copying, and then pasting it into Mail.

Landscape
You can now you can use landscape mode in “all key applications” including Mail.

App Subscriptions
Applications will now be able to charge on a subscription basis.

Text Message Forwarding and Deleting
You can forward and delete messages–individual messages or multiple messages.

Spotlight for iPhone!
Instead of having to slide between screens you can now simply flick your finger left from your home screen and start typing whatever application you’re looking for. Superb. It essentially becomes your new home screen.

Calendar Updates
CalDAV has been added, particularly useful for shared calendars.

Notes Sync
You can now sync your notes between the iPhone and Desktop

Voice memo application.
Allows you to record audio.

Stereo Bluetooth A2DP support
High quality audio can now be streamed from your iphone to another device via Bluetooth.

Peer to Peer Connectivity
Two iPhones or Touch’s and any other supported device will be able to connect directly —peer-to-peer—via Wi-Fi, without needing any Wi-Fi network. They can discover each other initially using Bluetooth, and then start a Wi-Fi connection automatically. You can send files via both devices.

Accessories SDK
You can now communicate directly with other accessories. So you’ll be able to control your TV’s volume for example.

Maps API in Apps
Notice how in some applications your directed over to Google Maps whenever the application needs to show you a map? Well no more, maps can be integrated into applications.

Turn by Turn
iPhone app developers can now create applications that perform turn by turn functionality as you have become familiar with on its google maps application.

Push Notifications
So no background apps but Apple have introduced “push notifications” which will mean you can still receive notifications from applications even if they aren’t actually running – particularly useful for instant messaging clients.

Voice Communication within Applications
So say your playing a shoot em’ up on the iPhone. With this update you’ll be able to talk against your competitor from within the app. Just like you would do with a headset on your desktop.

Update apps from within apps
So games can “sell” you new levels for example.

…When and How Much??

iPhone OS 3.0 will be a free upgrade to all iPhone users, including the first generation iPhones. iPod touch users will be able to buy it for $9.95. The beta version is available to developers now but the final release won’t be until the summer.

With great thanks to Gizmodo for their awesome live coverage of the event!