Back in June I wrote a blog post about Google Wave the new collaborative platform from Google. Well, on my return from holiday I found my sandbox account had arrived, so along with many other lucky developers, I have early access to the Wave platform. Over the weekend I took a few hours out to “play with my new toy” and I thought I’d let you know what I found in this episode of Outside the DXperience.
First things first, I’m running Windows 7 and so have Internet Explorer 8 installed by default. It turns out that Wave doesn’t much like IE8:
“Fair enough” I thought, but decided to push on regardless – a true technology pioneer me! Well it transpires that Google wasn’t exaggerating and, indeed, Wave doesn’t behave itself too well under IE8 – I managed to elicit this great error message from the Wave World:
Not much wanting to “explode” I decided to install Chrome and log back into Wave, whereupon I found all was well with the world:
In the image above, you can see an example of what most people are using Wave for at the moment and that is as a structured, inline, collaborative chat client. Structured because you can see all the conversations, in the Wave, laid out before you but you can elect to hide replies from certain conversations so that you can concentrate on others. Inline because you can make a reply at any stage of the conversation and your reply is injected right there, you don’t have to top post or bottom post and collaborative because anyone you choose can join in the conversation and the Wave is persisted on the Wave Server for all participants to refer to in the future. Beware though, at the moment there is no mechanism to remove people from a Wave once you have added them. :-)
As you can see, one of the Waves that I have subscribed to is one created by a group of Dundee based developers. This is the sort of thing that Wave was built to do. Dundee is the computer games capital of the UK; it also has a strong bio-medical presence and as such there are a lot of developer groups. This Wave (along with a Google Group) helps each group to stay in touch with each other and collaborate on common projects like Software Freedom Day. Here you can see a conversation on the Wave about the Horn project:
Of course Wave is not all about collaborative chat, there are also bots for example. So what is a bot in the Wave world? Well Google say:
A robot is an automated participant on a wave. A robot can read the contents of a wave in which it participates, modify the wave's contents, add or remove participants, and create new blips and new waves. In short, a robot can perform many of the actions that any other participant can perform.
Of course there is an API to allow developers to create these bots – some of which are extremely useful. Others… not so much: :-)
There are also Gadgets, which are “the standard way to embed non-trusted code in Google web applications”.
but the most interesting thing (I think anyway) is the ability to embed Waves in your own applications. Google says:
The Google Wave Embed API allows you to easily (and quickly) add communication and collaboration tools to your web applications. The Embed API allows you to embed waves on third party websites, anywhere in the web, for easy discussion and collaboration using wave's cutting-edge user interface. Any conversations on those waves also show up in your Wave client, making Wave an easy way to aggregate conversations you care about all over the web in one place.
And they are right, it’s fun and easy to use. In fact I’ve created a web page myself with a little demo Wave on it. Of course to see it and to participate in it, you’ll have to have a Google Wave Sandbox account, but if you do then stop by and add a comment to the wave. For those of you without sandbox accounts, the page looks like this:
All this and it even works on my iPhone too:
Well that’s enough playing with toys. I dare say I’ll write more on this subject as the platform matures, but for now, I better get back to the day job! :-)