The Geekorium

In my post yesterday I noted the increased push by the Wave developers to make it easier for the wave community to build and deploy extensions. It turns out this flurry of activity coincided with the imminent release of Version 2 of the Wave API, announced today.

The first new feature is the:

Active API: In v2, robots can now push information into waves (without having to wait to respond to a user action). This replaces the need for our deprecated cron API, as now you can update a wave when the weather changes or the stock price falls below some threshold. You can learn more in the Active API docs.

Google Wave Developer Blog Announcement.

If I understand this correctly (and I’m not a developer so correct me if I’m wrong) this means that before today, a robot in a wave might have had to wait until a user opened a wave before it could refresh the information in the wave (updating stocks etc), now the robot can initiate a wave update itself, making it possible to have robots create new blips in response to events. This is a much smarter way for a robot to behave, and should make for far more interesting and functional bots.

For a more enlightened perspective from a wave developer, check out Mastering Wave’s take on the announcement.

So what I initially thought was just a push to get developers involved was actually leading to an announcement of a massive upgrade to the API. In the end though, the aim is the same - to get developers engaged and creating interesting software to make Wave an indispensable tool.

Google Wave Developer Blog: Introducing Robots API v2: The Rise of Active Robots.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/avoiretc/ / CC BY 2.0

Here’s a neat little gadget/bot combo that could prove very useful for public waves if the system caught on.

Add the Karma Gadget and Bot to your waves and use it to rate your users (out of five stars). If users get consistently low scores, they will be automatically kicked from Waves that choose to turn on this option.

Of course there are some potential problems with such a tool: if a user expresses unpopular views in one wave and gets poor ratings, they might find themselves banned from any future wave that uses the tool, regardless of the subject. If the tool took off in popularity it could be quite horrible to find yourself on the end of such banishment.

On the other hand, if the tool doesn’t get popular it would be unreliable for crowdsourcing opinions, letting in known trolls who had just not been rated on enough waves.

Despite these shortcomings however, I would love to see this developed further (and even be integrated as part of the official spam-fighting tools of Wave), as I see great potential in harnessing the opinions of others in keeping waves free from known trolls and spammers.

One potential use case is the immediate banishment of those frustrating bots that pop up all over the place (Kanye-bot anyone?). I’m uncertain whether bots are in the firing line (Karma-Bot itself seems immune and doesn’t show up in the rating gadget). I’m also unclear about what happens if something like the public group (which can be rated) gets consistently bad reviews.

As of writing, the gadget does not carry out bans and won’t until Google implement the kick-out feature. I will be following this tool as it develops, and I’ll be looking for opportunities to use it. And if you see me on a wave that uses Karma, please be nice!

Karma: A Reputation Rating System for Google Wave Users.

Google has just unveiled their plans for group waves. The Google Wave Blog outlines the steps to set up a Google Group (yes, you have to use another tool) then add the group as a contact in Google Wave.

The service does not yet allow you to add users by their googlewave.com account (gmail.com only), and the permissions can only be handled through the Google Groups interface. It also seems that to avoid spam (being able to send messages to an everyone in a public group at once) users must pro-actively seek out the group wave and follow it to move it to their inbox [currently waiting for confirmation of this].

Like any Wave feature, this is still being developed and its behaviour could change over time. The Wave team have said they will continue to enhance the groups feature to make groups easier to navigate.

Waving with groups - Google Wave Blog.

If like me you find Chrome gives you the most stable, enjoyable experience of Google Wave, you might also be pining for the notifier extension Firefox users get.

Well now Chrome has a neat little extension that does the same thing. Jeremy Selier has built a neat little plugin that shows you how many unread waves you have in your inbox. It checks every thirty minutes by default (at the request of the Wave team), but you can set it to check more frequently in the extension options.

Something that makes a sound, or pops up a notification box (Growl-style) would be even more useful in some circumstances (Firefox is still my main browser of choice). However, if you need a simple way to see new Wave activity without checking the window every couple of minutes, this might just be the thing.

Chrome Extension - Google Wave Checker

Google fan Lookon has created a Bot to post to his Posterous blog, and written detailed instructions on how to do it.

It’s straight forward enough, add the bot and log in to the form it gives you. The next time you add the bot to a wave, the first wavelet gets posted at Posterous and it returns the URL for you to check.

Posterous seems to have the most diverse posting options of any blogging software available, and the addition of posting from waves puts it again at the forefront.

Now the bot needs to monitor comments and return them to the original wave for even tighter integration.

How to write a blog using Google Wave Robot for Posterous [Western Bridge over Google Wave]

(via Kerrie Anne’s Fridge Magnets)

You can spend ages getting used to Wave and what it can do, and still not learn the best way. Fernando Fonseca has jotted down five things that he recommends you do when you first fire up wave, to help you break in.

<a href=“http://www.bitrebels.com/geek/dont-miss-these-5-things-about-google-wave/”>Don’t Miss These 5 Things About Google Wave! [Bit Rebels]</a>

Gina Trapani, Adam Pash and the Wave community have put together a short ebook on Google Wave. I’m certain as Wave becomes more complex and useful, this guide will grow and change to match. Gina and Adam are two of the cleverest technology writers on the web today, and their book is set to become one of the most authoritative documents on Google Wave.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave

First, the extension installer gives you an option in your New Wave menu to “Go Trick or Treating”. When you click that, it creates a new wave and inserts a gadget (try clicking around that to see what surprises await). Then, whenever a user types ‘trick or treat’, the robot fetches an image from Google Image Search for either a yummy candy bar, or well, something not that yummy.

From the Google Wave Developer Blog\

No one I know has ever celebrated Halloween (it’s relatively new in Australia), and I say “Bah humbug!” (wrong holiday I know). But for those of you who want to get into the spirit of it (bad pun I know), but don’t want to leave Wave, this might be for you.

Trick or Treat Extension

Wave has a WYSIWYG interface for styling your blips. For those of us used to working on the web however, the default Bold/Italic/Dot-point tools can leave a lot to be desired. Many wont have a character pallet handy, or remember the windows/mac keyboard codes for producing various glyphs either. But if you’ve worked on the web long enough, you might be familiar with HTML/unicode character entities such as & (&) and • (•).

If you need to add various characters to your waves, and are familiar with HTML entities, then the Character Entity bot might be what you need. Add character-entityappspot.com@ to your wave, and whenever you write a character (in the format &code;) the bot will happily convert the code into the correct characters for you.

Here are a few to try:

• © becomes ©
• ↔ becomes ⟷
• ∴ becomes ∴

A more detailed list can be found at W3 Character Entity Reference Chart

Character Entity Bot [Google Code]

One thing I’ve been wondering is how we’ll get the chance to invite more people to Wave. I was one of the lucky ones who got in on the first round, and had invites to share, but those I’ve invited haven’t been so lucky. Currently my invite counter is sitting at “00” too.

As soon as we’re confident that the system can accept more users, we will add a wave to your account that allows you to nominate friends and colleagues for an account. Once you have the capability to invite people, the wave appear in your inbox.

– How do I invite people to try Google Wave? [Google Wave Help]

So we’ll be seeing this eventually (goodness knows how it’s added - magic fairy dust perhaps), so don’t fret - All in good time!

For the geeks out there (oh wait, that’s all of you) this gadget is for you.

The Wave Dice Gadget generates a dice-roll for you, and supports “standard PnP dice types”.

Go get your game on in-wave!

Wave Dice Gadget [Google Code]

The Wave experience can quickly become frustrating as your conversations get longer. It can take a couple of mouse-clicks to reply in the middle of a blip and then again to finish the blip. If you’re constantly shifting from keyboard to mouse and back again, your productivity can quickly suffer.

But take the time to learn some of these handy shortcuts and you’ll find the user interface less baffling and the usefulness of Wave will increase (I guarantee it!). For example, you can use “Shift + Enter” to:

Reply to a message at the end of a wave. The new message will appear at the same indentation level, at the very end of the wave.

[… But also has the …]

Same function as ‘Done’ button - signifies you are finished editing your addition to a wave.
Just this one shortcut has made my experience of Wave a thousand times better. You might find something that helps you out too!

Keyboard shortcuts [Google Wave Help]

Don’t get what all the fuss is about Wave? Don’t have the time to watch the original hour-twenty demonstration? Lifehacker has chopped the presentation up into bite-size chunks to highlight the parts they think are most important.

The Google Wave Highlight Reel

Waveboard is an app for the Mac (and coming soon for iPhone) that puts Google Wave into it’s own application window. Observant readers might recognise that this is not really all that different from using Fluid or Prism to create a stand-alone site-specific window. Links from the site suggest it is related to Mailplane, a similar concept for Gmail.

Additionally, the demonstrated iPhone application seems to be no different from what Google has already made possible simply by bookmarking your Wave page to the home screen.

If however you don’t wish to worry about setting something like this up yourself you may wish to give it a try.

Waveboard is free software (at time of writing). Waveboard\

One of the biggest complaints from first time Google Wave users is the tidal wave of information and updates that threatens to suck their precious time away as they watch the chaos unfold.

In a carefully tended wave, the noise and chaos are minimal, but in some of the larger (public) waves, users have given up hope of ever keeping on top of it all.

Charles Lehner has created a simple chat gadget that might help calm the swell, by focussing some of the chat into a form most of us will recognise: IM. By introducing this gadget to a wave, you can give people an outlet to speak that brings in years of built up convention for managing the flow. People understand Instant Messaging, so you can add this gadget to bring  normalcy to the new medium.

Perhaps you could embed this in a wave and encourage people to use it for idle chitchat, leaving the rest of the wave for the real-time collaboration on the task at hand.

As with other gadgets the Playback function records every new person who gets to the chat, and every message, so be aware that this can blow the size of your wave recording out with a lot of extra updates to wade through if necessary.

“Retro“ Chat for Google Wave [Wave Samples Gallery]