StartU

Yesterday evening, a Google Buzz hackathon took place in downtown Lisbon, at the Internacional Design Hotel. The event, which is called a #buzzathon, attracted around 50 participants who were eager to learn more about Google Buzz and how to develop applications that can interact with it.

The Google Buzz logo

Adewale Oshineye opened the event by giving a talk about Google Buzz and its API as a way to let people get acquainted with the technology and be able to start developing immediately. Topics included Activity Streams, Pubsubhubbub, OAuth, PHP, Python and more.

Then the real fun began and the hackathon started: 5 projects were demoed and the winner took home a Nexus One. The Google Buzz API provides developers with a powerful set of API endpoints for searching, reading, and updating post content and metadata. Here are some of the demoed projects:

• Python Buzz, by João Neves: a bot where you buzz python code and it gives you the output of the program;
• mashmush, by Rui Lopes: a client-side music listening application that shows buzzes about the bands you’re listening to;
• Tori’s Eye, by Luís Abreu: a visualization of buzzes about a given search query;
• Buzz battle, by João Pedro Gonçalves: a way to compare references to query strings around a geographic location.

And the winner was mashmush which will be available online at http://mashmush.com. Congratulations to the winner and to the portuguese GTUG for an excellent organization!