Google Wave Book

Found this great little nugget on the Google Wave Group:

We have released a new version of the Embed API, as well as an exciting new feature - anonymous read-only access for public waves. 

For more information, please see this wave: https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BgLIl... 

Next post will include an embedded public wave (it is Saturday after all and I must get out/about).

 

It may not seem like much, but obviously a lot of thought went into this new feature, given Wave's real-time flow coupled with its persistent nature.

Three scenarios are covered:

1. Person is added to a wave, but they are removed from a wave before they've opened it.  In that case, they never see the wave or any sign that they were added to it.
2. Person is added to a wave, they open it, and then they are removed.  They get access to a read-only copy of the wave.
3. You can remove yourself from a wave.

Very cool stuff.  A much requested feature is now out in the wild.

More here.

http://mashable.com/2010/04/21/google-wave-api-contest-winners/

In case you haven't heard, Mashable has teamed up with the Google Wave team for the Google Wave API Challenge, a month long contest for developers to create new extensions. The contest coincides with the recent release of the shiny new robots API, and it includes 3 main voting categories:

• Most Fun
• Most Useful
• Best Use of the Embed API

If you've been developing with any of the APIs (robots, gadgets, or wave embed), this is your chance to get some street cred as well as some nice prizes (including a ticket to the Google I/O conference). Already there are a few new creative extensions showcased on Mashable. My favorite is WaveTube, a YouTube player that displays a list of viewers in real time. The best touch is a gagdet that dynamically displays how far each participant is into watching the posted video. Clever, given that the extension provides some great context for all participants to get an idea of whether someone else has gotten a chance to watch all or part of a video. So what are you waiting for? Get cracking on some code and submit your extension before April 9th. Here's hoping you win, in which case I'll see you at Google I/O!

Journalism 2.0 has a new guest post by Hilary Fosdal entitled "Using a public Wave to engage a news audience." The post highlights how the Chicago Tribune's RedEye publication is using Google Wave to connect with readers by creating a new public wave to discuss a different news item each day. In essence, the Chicago Tribune has found a valuable way to foster discussion of news items in real-time with a targeted audience. The RedEye's public waves have a regular schedule (10:30 a.m. CST) and they have a thirty minute duration. However, the public waves don't exist in a vacuum. The news item or issue planned for discussion is announced on other major social media sites such as Twitter to encourage participation.

With each Daily Wave, RedEye connects with their readers and builds a sense of community. The RedEye is also demonstrating that is sees itself as more than a newspaper and more than a blog by embracing innovative technology that encourages a continuous and dynamic discussion about the news.

The post goes on to discuss how Robert Quigley, social media editor of the Austin American-Statesman, also uses public waves to engage with readers. Of course, discussing news items is one thing, but actually reporting news as it is occurring is another thing. And I think that is where we will potentially see an explosion of "live-waving" for a variety of events, not only news. Thus far Twitter has served as an invaluable tool for gathering real-time, albeit disjointed, information for a particular news item or event. The use of hash tags has effectively emerged as a way for classification and easier (though not easy) finding of relevant content. As Google Wave continues to gain momentum and users, we could see traditional and emerging media channels using Google Wave to report, correct, update, and distribute information to a broad (yet targeted) audience in real-time. Imagine searching for public waves, rather than tweets, that lead to active and open discussion about a particular news item? You could "follow" waves of interest or engage directly by replying and adding to one or more conversation threads. Cool stuff.

If you've been using Google Wave for a while, then you likely already know about public waves. These waves are viewable by anyone, and most people know that they can find public waves by entering the following terms into the search box at the top of the inbox pane: with:public [keywords] The search above essentially gives you the "river" of public waves, and it displays a bunch of different types of waves. Searching by keywords is nice, but to truly leverage the search capabilities of Google Wave, you need to use some additional operators and expressions.  Below are some search terms that you can use to find interesting waves that are more relevant to a specific topic or audience.

1. Search for public waves in which your friends are participants

This comes in handy if you know that some of your friends are using Google Wave and you want to find out which waves they are following. with:public with:(friend1@googlewave.com | friend2@googlewave.com | etc...) You could also use the same search but with another expression to find waves in which friend1 is a participant, but in which friend2 is not: with:public with:(friend1@googlewave.com | -friend2@googlewave.com) Did you see the expression? It's the dash (-) before the user name friend2@googlwave.com. This means that waves should not contain that participant.

2. Search for public waves in which a title contains specific keywords

Searching for public waves using the implicit keywords method returns waves in which either the title or the wave content include the keywords. Typically, a better way to find topical waves is to look for keywords in the title: with:public title:[keywords] Note that you could use an even more specific search by enclosing multiple keywords in double quotes. So if you want to find public waves that contain the phrase "World Cup", you would use this search: with:public title:"World Cup"

3. Search for public waves from the last seven days

By combining a set period of time and keywords, you can find "fresh" waves about a specific topic. In this case, you can use the past operator to limit time: with:public past:7d Again, we could add a title keyword expression to refine even further: with:public past:7d title:"World Cup"

4. Search for public waves with cool photos

Did you know you can search for waves that contains elements, such as images, in addition to keywords? You can use the has:image expression. The search below will find public waves with photos that include "photography" in the title. with:public has:image title:photography

5. Search for public waves with specific tags

Ideally, if participants in a wave are savvy, the wave has been tagged with terms relevant to the wave's topic(s). You can use the tag operator in conjunction with the | (or) expression to find all kinds of interesting waves. This search will find waves tagged with "python" that contain either "app engine" or "django": with:public tag:python about:"app engine" | django Stay tuned. Some more on search expressions and further refining results next week.

So a few examples of collaboration in Google Wave caught my attention today. The first example is the use of Google Wave to collaborate on the development of a beer recipe for a home brew project. Some enterprising brewers alternated between Google Wave and Twitter to put together the xBrew project, in which home brewers across the country will brew same beer on the same day. An interesting project (and niche), and a good example of how Google Wave has appeal to a broad set of users.

The second example is based on the evolution of an experimental wave by an independent filmmaker in North Carolina. Lynn Casper, a social media strategist for Working Films, started by creating a public wave for North Carolina-based filmmakers to see if they might discuss how Google Wave can be used to improve their efforts. The initial wave has grown quite a bit and it has evolved to become a resource for communication and collaboration among another niche. According to the article in the Examiner.com:

Several film companies and filmmakers are “Waving” on the Wave she created. They’re discussing situations where Google Wave would be helpful to them, such as collaborating with partner organizations and groups, tracking online efforts, staying connected with various teams of a film operation and organizing screenings. They’re also talking about using Google Wave’s map gadget to map out film locations, visualize screenings and map out film festivals and dates for distribution purposes.

Pretty cool stuff. I imagine we'll continue to see stories like this emerge as Google Wave's user base continues to grow and more users become aware of just how applicable the platform is to so many needs. P.S. It appears that the xBrew wave is private. However, you can check out the North Carolina filmmakers wave here.

Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's SVP for Product Management recently posted some thoughts about the "meaning of open" in the context of Google's efforts. I won't dissect all of the points that Jonathan has made, although I encourage you to review his post to get a better idea of how Google approaches open technology and open information. However, I do think it's worthwhile to informally review a few salient points relevant to Google Wave, which itself is a relatively open platform.

Jonathan argues that open systems win. That is to say, open systems are mutually beneficial for companies, users, developers, and everybody in between. He states that open systems lead to competition that ultimately leads to better, more innovative products:

Open systems are just the opposite. They are competitive and far more dynamic. In an open system, a competitive advantage doesn't derive from locking in customers, but rather from understanding the fast-moving system better than anyone else and using that knowledge to generate better, more innovative products. The successful company in an open system is both a fast innovator and a thought leader; the brand value of thought leadership attracts customers and then fast innovation keeps them.

This point sheds some light on the launch of Google Wave as a relatively open platform. Google could have launched Google Wave as a closed system (platform), with the goal of garnering and locking in users to a new model of communication and collaboration. Instead, Google Wave reflects several tiers of openness, from its product (client) and APIs, both of which are freely and easily accessible, to the open source network protocol that will eventually yield a federated set of wave providers. Since its initial release Google Wave has been an extremely open platform. This openness has given way to innovation driven both by Google's internal response to user feedback (early-on in the product's development) and by third parties that have utilized and adopted the APIs and network protocol to extend the platform quite rapidly. In this sense, Google has gained the competitive advantage by being a thought leader (i.e., by releasing Google Wave) and by understanding its own, yet highly open system, better than anyone else.

Open systems have the potential to spawn industries. They harness the intellect of the general population and spur businesses to compete, innovate, and win based on the merits of their products and not just the brilliance of their business tactics. The race to map the human genome is one example.

To date we have seen quite a bit of activity by developers who have begun to integrate Google Wave with other services, be they social networks or enterprise systems. And I think that we're just at the very beginning of seeing Google Wave's potential to spawn a new ecosystem, and subsequently new industries, that revolve around the platform's long tail (much in the same way we've seen the long tail of Google Maps). Its openness has significant implications, as it attracts third party development, yet it also breeds competition.  We're still at the early stages of Google Wave, however, so the long tail and competition are not nearly as prominent as they could (and likely will) eventually be. Towards the end of his post, Jonathan hits the nail on the head:

Closed systems are well-defined and profitable, but only for those who control them. Open systems are chaotic and profitable, but only for those who understand them well and move faster than everyone else. Closed systems grow quickly while open systems evolve more slowly, so placing your bets on open requires the optimism, will, and means to think long term. Fortunately, at Google we have all three of these. Because of our reach, technical know-how, and lust for big projects, we can take on big challenges that require large investments and lack an obvious, near-term pay-off. We can photograph the world's streets so that you can explore the neighborhood around an apartment you are considering renting from a thousand miles away. We can scan millions of books and make them widely accessible (while respecting the rights of publishers and authors). We can create an email system that gives away a gigabyte of storage (now over 7 gigs) at a time when all other services allow only a small fraction of that amount. We can instantly translate web pages from any of 51 languages. We can process search data to help public health agencies detect flu outbreaks much earlier. We can build a faster browser (Chrome), a better mobile operating system (Android), and an entirely new communications platform (Wave), and then open them up for the world to build upon, customize, and improve. We can do these things because they are information problems and we have the computer scientists, technology, and computational power to solve them. When we do, we make numerous platforms - video, maps, mobile, PCs, voice, enterprise - better, more competitive, and more innovative. We are often attacked for being too big, but sometimes being bigger allows us to take on the impossible.

Skeptics and competitors alike have criticized Google Wave in varying degrees, but I think it's still too early to tell (I also remember hearing from skeptics doubting the viability of Twitter).  As Jonathan states, "open systems evolve more slowly, so placing your bets on open requires the optimism, will, and means to think long term."  Google Wave is not a one-trick pony, it is a broad and sophisticated platform.  Couple that with making it open and accessible early on during its development, and you may understand that the vision for Google Wave requires long term optimism. Reinventing email to provide a new model (and corresponding network protocol) for real-time communication and collaboration is not easy.  But few companies out there have the economies of scale that Google does.  "We are often attacked for being too big, but sometimes being bigger allows us to take on the impossible."  To some it may seem that moving something like Google Wave forward is impossible, but that seems to be part of the point.  Google's resources, its size, and dare I say its inertia, are part of what give Google Wave a real chance of becoming an established and successful platform in the long term.

In Google Wave: Up and Running I include a sample use case for using Google Wave to hold a virtual international conference. The idea behind the use case is that Google Wave is quite suitable for multi-national communication and collaboration that can occur in both real-time and delayed time. Adam Vaughan at The Guardian (UK) has a real life story that highlights this point. In "Young people negotiate Copenhagen deal using Google Wave" we can see how over 1,000 people from 140 countries have been using Google Wave to discuss, debate, and collaborate on issues related to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Google Wave has proven to be a great tool for these young folks, although as Adam points out, the access to the Web that so many of us take for granted was hard to come by in some cases:

Access didn't come easy to some of those participating in the online debate between 15 to 25 year olds around the world. The Global Youth Panel has some inspiring stories from Iranian debaters who bypassed web censoring software and a Bhutan who team persuaded their ISP to offer extra bandwidth. Meanwhile a coordinator in Cambodia gave IT training to 30 kids from "some of the poorest, most destitute families in Cambodia" so they could take part.

It seems that the panel debates have produced a good amount of discussion, which is nicely memorialized in each wave. You can check out the waves used for the debate by using this search in your Google Wave inbox: with:public global youth panel debates And if you're wondering why the debates occurred in Google Wave instead of other online mediums, the article includes this salient point:

But why use Wave rather than, say, email or Wiki-style software? David Crane of Debatewise, which organised the youth panel, says "there's no way we could get this many people debating in real-time otherwise." He also points to Wave's real-time typing feature as being useful for such a fast-changing event as Copenhagen, because it makes it easy to answer a question before it's fully typed.

I expect that this is only the beginning, and soon we'll see Google Wave being used to facilitate an increasing number of online debates and conferences. And perhaps it's apropos to mention that making events more accessible hopefully will reduce the carbon footprint associated with traditional conferences that require extensive air travel and/or accommodations.

By now chances are pretty good that you've heard of Google Wave, Google's new real-time communication and collaboration platform that incorporates several types of web technologies, including email, instant messaging (IM), wiki, online documents, and gadgets.  If you're still coming up to speed, you can check out my Introduction to Google Wave article on oreilly.com. In the process of writing Google Wave: Up and Running, I've been fortunate to have multiple opportunities to discuss Google Wave with a variety of folks, including techies and non-techies alike.  In this introductory post, I'd like to briefly discuss Google Wave at a macro level, and in particular touch on the fact that Google Wave is more than a product, but an uber-platform comprised of three layers. Google Wave is not just an app. You read that right.  Most folks think of Google Wave as a web app, but in fact the app is just one of the layers of Google Wave, albeit perhaps the most visible of the layers.  The other two layers are the Google Wave APIs (commonly referred to as the platform layer) and the Google Wave Federation Protocol (commonly referred to as the network protocol layer). Despite the fact that Google made this distinction early on, the breadth of the Google Wave "platform" inherently makes it a little bit more difficult to get the point across to a diverse audience.  Here is how Google describes these three layers:

• The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It's an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).
• Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
• The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the "live" concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.

Why is this distinction important?  For one, the overall game-changing implications and potential of Google Wave cannot be fully understood if one simply thinks of Google Wave as a web app.  The app itself is important, yes, as it represents Google's current effort to provide end users with a way to utilize the protocol and extensions developed with the APIs.  But the other two layers are just as important.  The fact that the open APIs can be used to extend, enhance, and improve communication and collaboration are just as important.  And the fact that the protocol is open source and allows for federation (i.e., multiple providers) is also extremely important, as other parties will be able to set up interoperable wave servers. Not everyone needs to understand the three layers at a technical level, but I do think it's valuable for just about everyone to understand that Google Wave is more than the web app.  My mother, for example, will never write a line of code for the APIs, and the only protocol of which she's aware relates to dining etiquette.  Still, I am proud to say that she "gets" it.  She understands that developers can program cool extensions that can be used in the app, and she's aware that in the future other service providers like Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft could provide their own wave accounts (and maybe even apps). Now, getting her to wave with me about topics other than why I don't call her enough is a different story.