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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.

People will build services on top of analyzing your public Buzz activity. They will build new applications for publishing to Buzz,

Planned support for things like the Salmon commenting standard mean that comments left on Buzz could appear out on blog posts around the web, and comments on blog posts could be viewed inside of Buzz when the post links are shared.

a cross-platform messaging service. Facebook users can only message other Facebook users

Is Google centralizing too much of the decision making about the future of an ostensibly decentralized web?

"Comin soon - Over the next several months Google Buzz will introduce an API for developers, including full/read write support for posts with the Atom Publishing Protocol, rich activity notification with Activity Streams, delegated authorization with OAuth, federated comments and activities with Salmon, distributed profile and contact information with WebFinger, and much, much more."

It would have been disruptive if google had pushed W3C standards for sharing data (Semantic web technologies, LinkedData, ...). But does Google really want to push semantic web technologies, making the web easier to search ?

Content Enhancement — There’s a whole world of Linked Data out there and OpenCalais can be your entry point. For example – take in press releases, and extract the companies mentioned in them. Use OpenCalais’ Linked Data entry points to get the SIC codes and the link to DBPedia. Access DBPedia and enhance your content with other information about the company like locations, people, products. Access Geonames to figure out what region the company is located in. Take that enhanced content and do cool things (like triage and workflow and presentation) with it.

Alerting — Give users the ability to be alerted when certain types of content becomes available. Unlike simple keyword alerting with OpenCalais + Linked Data you can construct alerts like, “Tell me when there is M&A activity for a company in the Steel industry.”

Automated News Portals — Want to create a general purpose news portal? Or maybe one that deals only with baseball news? Great. Subscribe to and/or acquire some content sources, and feed them through OpenCalais. Then use the metadata to throw away what you don’t care about and to organize the rest by topic, geography, person – whatever. A great example of an off-the-shelf solution that does this is OpenPublish.

Finer-Grained / Higher-Value Syndication — Do you have content consumers via RSS or other syndication methods? Give them a better experience by allowing them to create their own channels based on OpenCalais metadata. Create channels based on region, types of events, companies, etc. – or any combination of those and other items.

SEO — Something we get asked about all the time – we know people are experimenting – but they’re not being very public about their experimentation. Here’s a simple idea though: make your content more search friendly. Two routes: One easy, one a little harder. Route 1: Translate events into human readable text and get it on your page. Have a complicated article about an LBO of company x by people y? OpenCalais will identify an M&A event. Take that event and turn it into a tag like “Acquisitions” – something people might actually search for. Don’t just use it as a metatag – incorporate into the page via navigation or whatever so Google pays attention. Route 2: Use linked data to enhance your content. If you’re talking about a company or geography use OpenCalais Linked Data to enhance the page with additional information from Dbpedia, Geonames, CIA world fact book or a bunch of other sources.

The latest version also now supports Lucene-based applications, so any organization using the open source search toolkits can get the same advanced linguistic processing used by high end web and enterprise search engines.