If you haven't yet got Google Buzz in your gmail, or like me you're using Google Apps For Your Domain (GAFYD) and you won't get it for a month or so there is a cunning trick you can use to get it on your desktop right now.

All you need to do is pretend to be a mobile phone, phones going to buzz.google.com see the phone version of the UI and it's serviceable for posting updates and managing friends. There's so much missing but it's a good start. Google Chrome accepts a --user-agent flag and the user agent for the Google Nexus One phone is Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1-update1; en-us; Nexus One). That's easy to add under Windows or Linux, on the Mac it's a little harder but the User Data Directory page gives you instructions on how to set up a different user-data-dir which is also a good idea. Here's the string I used.

do shell script "/Applications/Google\\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\\ Chrome --enable-udd-profiles --user-data-dir=/Users/$USER/Library/Application\\ Support/Google/Buzz --user-agent='Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1-update1; en-us; (Nexus One)'  > /dev/null 2>&1 &"

One day I'll work out a nice way to get the Buzz Icon in there, likely I'll spend days on it and finish the day before I get full featured buzz in my GAFYD mailbox!

If you'd like to pretend to be an iPad the useragent is "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10" I wonder if it's a coincidence this is 141 characters and untweetable?