(Cross-posted with the Google Code Blog)

Following on the heels of today's announcement on Buzz, we're excited to bring you the latest on all things social at Google I/O, starting with a session on Buzz APIs and a new panel session!

What's the hubbub about Google Buzz APIs?
Google Buzz is a new way to share updates, photos, videos and more, and start conversations about the things you find interesting. In this session, we'll take a deep dive into building with the Buzz APIs and the open standards it uses, such as ActivityStrea.ms, PubSubHubbub, OAuth, Salmon and WebFinger.

Where is the social web going next?
With the advent of social protocols like OAuth, OpenID and ActivityStrea.ms, it's clear that the web has gone social and is becoming more open. Adam Nash (LinkedIn), Daniel Raffel (Yahoo), John Panzer (Google), Lili Cheng (Microsoft), Monica Keller (MySpace), and Ryan Sarver (Twitter) will discuss the importance of such emerging technologies, how they've adopted them in their products and debate what's next.

Here are additional sessions that'll give you a deep dive into the emerging technologies and standards that will help you create a more engaging user experience for your web applications and sites, and enable a people-centric web.

• Optimize your site with Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, Twitter, & more
• iGoogle developer portal and tools
• Make your application real-time with PubSubHubbub
• The open & social web

You'll also have the opportunity to meet developers from the following companies in the Social Web pod of the Developer Sandbox: Atlassian, eBay, IBM, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Playfish, Yahoo!, and Voxeo. They'll be demoing their social apps, talking in-depth about integrating with various Google technologies, answering questions, and chatting with attendees.

To learn more about and register for Google I/O, visit code.google.com/io. We add new sessions and content to the I/O website each week, so follow @googleio on Twitter to keep up with changes!

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Developer Team

Today we launched Google Buzz, a new way to share updates, photos, videos and more, and start conversations about the things you find interesting. On the Google Code blog we outlined our hopes for Google Buzz and the developer community, and we'd like to share more about those plans here.

We believe that the social web works best when it works like the rest of the web — many sites linked together by simple open standards. Rather than launching with a one-off API, we see Buzz as a tremendous opportunity to work with the community to create and support open protocols for the next generation of social web apps and websites. To kick things off, Buzz is launching with support for public activity feeds and offers users the option to connect their favorite sites to their Buzz activity feed using open protocols.  In the near future we plan to greatly expand the scope of these developer services, and we'd like you to be a part of that process.

We invite you to join us over the next several months as we continue to evolve the Google Buzz APIs around protocols such as Atom, AtomPub, Activity Streams, PubSubHubbub, OAuth, MediaRSS, Salmon, the Social Graph API, PortableContacts, WebFinger, and much, much more. If those names aren't all familiar to you today, that's okay — please visit the Buzz API site on Google Code to learn more. And please join us on the Google Buzz API discussion group, where we will share what we've learned so far, and work with everyone here on where we are going next.

By DeWitt Clinton, Google Developer Team