Willing to make Waves?

This year at Google IO (Google Annual Developer Conference) besides handing out Android powered Hutch G1 phone to all the attendees, Google announced - Google WAVE, a new way to look at collaborative computing. Also around it was the 3P concept - Product, Platform and Protocol. The platform and protocol are intended to open sourced, to allow developers to independently build "Wave" platforms and also communicate with other "Wave" systems. This was another surprize for Google IO attendees this year and yeah, I don't think they were disappointed.

Google Wave has been built by the same team who brought Google Maps and associated API to the world. It is built using Google Web Toolkit and HTML 5.0. The demos at Google IO, included its usage on Google Chrome (isn't that obvious...Duh!), Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox. Hmm... I see there is a big browser player missing out here. (Internet Explorer, of course). Though Google Wave is capable of communicate with existing systems like Twitter and Orkut... the most impressive feature was its extensibilty through "robots". They held best of that lot for the last. I was blown away by Rossy... built in collaboration with Google Research.

Here is the You Tube! video, you NEED to watch.



URLS of Interest:

• Product: http://wave.google.com


• Platform: http://code.google.com/apis/wave


• Protocol: http://www.waveprotocol.org

Unfortuately all I did was look at the You Tube! videos about this platform/developer preview and regret not being there... :(

As with every new fangled thing with Google (like the GMail), the subscription to Google Wave platform is limited. Offered only to people who attended Google IO 2009 (A point emphaisized by Lars - Product Manager for Google Wave - not once, not twice but many a times during the presentation... Dang!) and of course, you stand in line and apply for an account on the preview website.