Connect Quora to Google Buzz

If you’ve got caught up in Quora’s perfect storm, the site itself might not be enough. You probably want to spread the word about it on other social networks, to bring more people in. Quora lets you easily share answers on Twitter and Facebook, but unfortunately Google Buzz users are left out. Which naturally led to a question on Quora: Is there a way to link Quora and Google Buzz?

One answer, as already added, is to subscribe to the (not dead yet!) RSS feed from the Quora profile through Google Reader and then share individual posts to send them to Buzz. Not exactly ideal, since it requires a lot of manual intervention and it looses the ‘real-time’ coolness everybody seems to want these days.

Another solution that doesn’t require manual action after the initial setup is to apply one of the nicer features in Buzz: the ability to import from third-party sites, as long as they are connected to your Google Profile. So here are the steps:

• Go to your Google profile and add a link to the Quora profile;
• Do the same on Quora, pointing at the Google profile;
• Head on to Google Buzz and edit your connected sites. Quora should appear as a new option in the lower half of the screen – for me the Q&A site was available immediately. Just click ‘Add’ and ‘Save’ and you’re done.

The integration with Buzz is very good and feels natural: it picks up not only your full answers, but also the questions you follow and the answers you vote up. Pretty much anything you can get from the Quora RSS. This could become noisy for your followers, especially if Quora is your new addiction. From this point of view, the first solution could be preferable, because it lets you share selectively instead of automatically. But Buzz now has the ability to filter out posts by source, so anyone can decide to hide your Quora activity if they don’t want to participate. On the other hand, importing your Quora activity to Buzz can act as a backup and a searchable archive; especially useful if you find valuable answers that you want to refer later: one vote up and they are saved in your Gmail account. So regardless weather Quora is becoming what Google Buzz should have been or not, it seems Buzz is ready for it.

Update: I looks like the noise problem is far worse that I thought. For me and some others trying this method out, Buzz pulls in your Quora activity over and over again, creating an infinite loop of duplicates. Maybe this will get sorted out sometime soon, but for now I'll disconnect the sites. Please leave a comment if you try it out later and the problem is fixed.