Spread Google Wave

When we first launched Google Wave in developer preview mode at last year's I/O, thousands of developers started playing around on WaveSandbox.com, experimenting with the APIs, and checking out the preliminary set of specs and whitepapers on waveprotocol.org. Back then, many developers looked around and decided that they couldn't do what they wanted with the APIs yet, or the protocol wasn't fleshed out enough for their needs, so they filed their feature requests and slowly disappeared from the Wave world.

Today, we'd like to encourage all those developers to take a second look. Over the past year, and today at Google I/O, we've launched a series of improvements that make Wave a more compelling platform, product, and protocol, and enable the kind of apps and integrations developers first dreamed of when they encountered Wave.

Here's a quick recap of the last few months of API releases:

Over the last few releases, we've been rolling out incremental improvements to the robots API, based on the feedback from all of you developers. For those of you who haven't been reading the forum waves and changelogs, here's a summary of the new features:

Bundled Annotations:

We recently introduced a new API for embedding waves, which includes a powerful new feature: anonymous, read-only access to public waves. Prior to this launch, webmasters could embed waves into their sites, but visitors could only see the content of the embedded wave if they had a Google Wave account, were logged in, and had access to that particular wave. Now, all waves with public@a.gwave.com (or a properly configured Google Group) as a participant can be embedded in a website so their content can be read by those who don't have a wave account (or simply aren't logged in).

You can view an example of this below or see it in action by visiting the KitchenSinky walkthrough documentation.

We launched the new Robots API (v2) last month, and since then, we've seen a a slew of new and interesting robots from Google Wave developers -- proving that robots can now be used in more ways than ever before.

We want to share some examples here, to give you a taste of the possibilities:

We've added 10 new articles to the documentation, written by both the Google Wave API team and developers like you, and we hope these articles will give you a new way of understanding how to use the APIs.

After launching the new robots API a month ago, robot developers have already written a bunch of articles about using it in various ways, from developing in Eclipse to integrating with Salesforce:

When we shipped the FedOne code to demonstrate the Google Wave Federation Protocol, we included some overview information and basic documentation on how to get it up and running. Since then, the community has stepped up and contributed some great documentation, and we wanted to highlight a couple of great resources that may be helpful to anyone interested in the Google Wave Federationn Protocol.

For example, Anthony Watkins wrote several articles to explain the architecture of the FedOne code:

As a student at university, I always loved when I had the chance to use a Web API in my programming assignments. I think Web API programming is a great way for students to get a taste of the real world, and plus, APIs are just plain fun. :)

So, I was thrilled when I found out that a class of students in Singapore were working on a Google Wave extensions project, and I volunteered to give them a virtual talk. As part of the talk, I critiqued each of their final projects, giving them advice on making them "Wave-ier"and easier to use. Overall, I was incredibly impressed with the diversity & utility of their extensions - everything from adorable games to meeting planners:

Ian Roughley is an architect on Novell Pulse, a new real-time collaboration environment for enterprises that federates with Google Wave so users of both products can work together using their tool of choice.

For Novell Pulse, it was a pretty easy decision to adopt the Google Wave Federation Protocol. For many months before Google Wave was announced to the world, we had been working on solving exactly the same problems: how to collaborate instantly and on‑demand; how to make collaboration easier for groups; how to expedite document workflow; and how to do it all in real‑time. We had also come to many of the same conclusions, and if you look at the products side‑by‑side you can see this reflected through the interfaces. Not exactly, but certainly the big decisions.

Now that the new Wave Robots API is launched, we're excited to spread the word about Wave to developers in all corners of the world. Please join us in one of the upcoming events:

We've just rolled out an initial version of our extensions gallery: simply look for "Extensions" in the navigation panel of Google Wave. The gallery is intended to make it easier for users to discover the fun and useful extensions you all are building with the Google Wave APIs.

Hi! I'm Anna Rose Kerr, a Kiwi and Google Wave user living in Sydney. Coming from a background in creative advertising, I see a lot of potential for Wave to make everyday tasks more efficient and enjoyable. Now, I want to share one of my ideas for how developers can make my own life easier.

Before I moved in with my boyfriend, I had no idea that making dinner could be such a complex problem. My normal approach of "eat whatever I feel like when I get hungry" does not compute with him, and thus we spend hours each day discussing what is for dinner that night. We have to factor in what's in the fridge that needs to be consumed, seasonal product, and which animal he currently feels sympathetic towards and won't eat. It often gets too complicated and we end up eating take-aways.

Robots are an important part of the Google Wave API, and they've just become a lot more powerful. We've recently released version 2.0 of the robots API, which includes a bunch of new features:

Greetings! I'm Amanda and I work on Developer Relations for Google Wave. Continuing on our series of dream Google Wave extensions, I want to tell you one of my own wish...a Wave-ified workflow system.

From Expense Reports to major Press Releases, there are a lot of documents a typical company produces that require a workflow to ask for reviews and collect the necessary approvals/signatures. Google Wave is already very useful as a mean for collaboration to produce such documents and can potentially be extended to process workflows as well.

Unlike the launch of Google Wave last year, Google released Buzz with significantly less fanfare but with a lot more real promise. Buzz is yet another attempt by Google to add a social component to their varied product portfolio. Let's...

Hi, I'm Anna-Christina, I work on product marketing for Google Wave. Aside from "drinkin' coffee", I run a weekly team meeting using waves: I start the wave ahead of time, people add their questions and agenda items, then during the meeting I project the wave on the screen for people in the room, and others just follow along. Generally, it runs pretty smoothly, except for one thing: I can't tell how long we talk about each topic!

I would love a collaborative timer, clock, or stopwatch that I could put at the top of a wave when the meeting starts. As we begin each topic, we can set the timer for a given amount of time, and we could easily see when we are taking too much time (or approaching that stage). Ideally, we could embed the gadget twice, and use one of them to keep track of the overall meeting length. I run a tight ship! :)