The Geekorium

A few weeks ago, I noticed a new feature of Google Wave that allowed a user to easily send websites and content to a new wave to easily share with others. The feature (called “Wave This”) was not officially announced at the time, and I was asked politely not to say anything more at the time until the team could officially announce it.

In addition to this, the Wave This function has an official Chrome Extension. Install the extension, and you can send any page to Wave with a click!

Finally, you can also use an undocumented Wave This feature to add a Wave contact button to your sites. At the top of my page I’ve added a “Wave @ me!” button that starts a new wave with me as a participant so you can easily contact me in Google Wave. To add the button to your own site it’s as easy as filling your details in the code below:

<a href="https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=Contact+via+[Your-Site-Name]&r=[fill-in-your-@-wave-address-here]" title="Contact me in Google Wave" class="vt-p">

The &r parameter for adding a recipient isn’t listed on the API page and support might be pulled or altered so use at your own risk. Additionally, be aware that the Wave This function currently defaults to the Google Wave Preview account only, so if you use a different client (a Google Wave for Domain Apps account for instance, or Novell Pulse) you’re out of luck for now.

So there you have it! A new API, an awesome function, and my modest widget. Have at it! Make some buttons Start spreading Wave!

In yesterday’s open thread, I used Mr-Ray by wave.to to allow non-wavers to access a wave. Mr-Ray’s real purpose is to be an intermediary between Wavers and emailers. It does this by creating a simple wave interface when you add someone to a wave by their email address.

Well Mr-Ray wasn’t the first attempt to get Wave and Email to interoperate. A couple of Googlers used their “20% time“ to create Emaily, a bot that behaves very similarly to Mr-Ray on the Wave side, but tackles the email side of things a little differently. When you add Emaily, it first creates an email address for you on its servers. Then when you add the address of a non-waver, it sends an email to that person with the details of your update and they can reply right from their email. I have to say, it creates a pretty seamless bridge between the two worlds from the email side. In Wave though, you get to see their entire email shoehorned into a wave, with “>” reply markers and signatures left in. For anything more than simple communication back and forth this could get messy.

The developers of Emaily have said they are planning to integrate Emaily even more into Wave by “rearchitecting Emaily into an application, which uses more of the internal Google services”. Hopefully this could be the beginning of actual built-in email capability in Wave that could speed the transition of more users from old technology to new.

Try it today. Add “emaily-wave@appspot.com” to a wave and send an email to a non-wave friend! Will extensions like Emaily and Mr-Ray help you transition to Wave any faster?

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

Recently, the Wave Team have made a big push to publicise more bots and extensions. In a post to the Google Wave Help forum, Kylie announced that some users might start seeing a new Extensions link in their navigation panel. Then enterprising Wavers noted that anyone could get access to this Extension information with a search for [<a title=“Search on Google Wave for Extensions” href=“https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=wave&passive=true&nui=1&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F&ltmpl=standard”>group:google-wave-extension-gallery@googlegroups.com].

Now Google have made it easier than ever to submit an extension to the Wave Extension review team using a simple bot.

Create a new wave and add the Submitty bot (submitty-bot@appspot.com), and Submitty will create a submission form for you to fill out. At the bottom are a couple of checkboxes. If you check either of these boxes, you’ll be prompted to fill in more information about your bot and/or gadget. Finally, you add the Extension Review Group (google-wave-extensions-review@googlegroups.com) to your wave to submit your extension.

By making this process easier, the Wave team hopes to encourage development of extensions to rapidly build up an ecosystem around Wave. Without a varied and useful set of apps, Wave will remain no more than a fun experiment.

Which also explains their dedication to an extensive and open API which they continue to enhance with supporting bots. In addition to the Submitty bot, they have released Gadgitty, a bot for editing your gadgets inline and seeing the results straight away.

Between these two bots and the others submitted by the Google Wave APIs Team, it’s obvious how important developers are to the creators of Wave, and I hope it spurs further experimentation from the wave community.

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

The Next Web attended the Google Wave GTUG (Google Technology User Group) meetup in London where Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon (the two responsible for Google Wave) gave a presentation on some upcoming Google Wave APIs. James Glick from The Next Web has included a dot-point summary of the most important parts, a few of which I have included below. Read his article for even more juicy inside information.

bq.. To cut a potentially exhausting blog post short, a summary of snippets from their presentation include:

• Extension gallery to be fully up and running in months with a wider collection and sharing functionality.
• An extension store is planned where developers would be able to display and charge for apps.
• [… snipped …]
• Google Wave will be able to be deployed within networks and intranets for organisations and companies to use internally.
• Although it has been requested by a substantial amount of preview users, there are no plans to intergrate Gmail or any mail with Google Wave. The APIs though, will provide developers with the ability to do it in the future…

– Read the article at The Next Web for more

The rest of the items on Glick’s list show Wave team is obviously committed to improving the experience for everyone. The four items I’ve included above highlight for me the potential for Wave to grow beyond the bounds of what Google can achieve and put it firmly in the hands of developers who can make it a thriving, useful tool. If Wave can ever dethrone email as the default form of communication, it will be because of these for things: The ability for developers to extend it and make money from it, for businesses to deploy their own secure versions, and for Wave to send and receive email. Although it looks like the Google team don’t have plans to bake email support in, I am confident it will not be long before such an extension is built and available.

“…developers have asked us a lot for a market place where we’ll help them sell their extensions to our users including a revenue share so we’ll also make some money from it. “I’ll be very surprised if we don’t go down that route.” - Google Wave to have application store | News | TechRadar UK

This will be a very important development in the success of Wave. The iPhone has grown enormously by making high quality apps simple to pay for and receive. The key difference for Wave will be that the protocol is open for anyone to extend, and the main client (the Google Wave interface) is web based.

I predict this will mean a lot more extensions will be made open source or free. Of course it’s highly dependent on the quality and user experience of the store. If a developer can make an extension open source, but still make it available in the same marketplace many will choose to do so.

Keep in mind too, that over time other clients will emerge that will access the Wave protocol, and it will be interesting to see if the marketplace will extend to such clients.

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]

Using the WaveVotely bot, people can vote on which public waves are useful or fun. The results are collated at the Waverz site.

Votely - Votes for public Waves

Some useful robots and gadgets that aren’t so well known

GO2WEB20 Blog: 11 Wave Tools You May Not Know Exist\

Dedicated to the growing number of gadgets and robots being made for Google Wave.

Wavety.com

jWave is a jQuery plug-in that you can use to easily embed a Google Wave into your website with the grace and simplicity of jQuery.

jQuery Plugins

This jQuery plugin was one of the first community made additions on the Google Wave API page.

The Google Wave APIs come in two flavors: Embed and Extensions. With Embed, you’re able to bring waves into your own site through a simple JavaScript API. For example, embedding a wave in a webpage is a good way to encourage a discussion among the visitors. With Extensions, you’re able to write programs, which are packaged as Robots or Gadgets, that provide rich functionality inside the Google Wave web client.

Introducing the Google Wave APIs

This is Google Wave as a Platform, one of the “Three Ps” of the Wave. The API gives developers a way to plug in to the Wave product and offer new and interesting ways of using waves. For instance at the preview, a software robot developed using the API could be added to a conversation to translate your waves in real-time into other languages.

I’ll be covering more of the ways the API can be used in later posts, but for now I’ll say it’s powerful way to make an already compelling product even more useful.

Google wants developers creating value to add to their product on day one. Hopefully someone enterprising will use the API to bridge the gap between email and waves unless Google does it first.