Google Wave October Meetups

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Google Wave October Meetups

Posted by Matt Perez on 10/22/2009 in google wave , community

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I've attended two Google Wave Meetups in the last two weeks and they were both great. It is remarkable how quickly developers are filling out the Wave ecosystem with robots and gadgets and whatnots. One "bot" in particular, I found mind blowing.

Google Wave Logo Last week's meetup took place in Palo Alto; yesterday's meetup was in San Francisco. Both were organized by Lawrence Wong who does a really good job of finding interesting speakers (and an even better job of keeping the events on track).

San Francisco October Meetup (#SFGWave)

In addition to the two kegs of beer and 40 pizzas, there was a competition for Wave invitations, two presentations and we watched a video.

The event got kicked off by the competition to get Google Wave invitations (Peter Mullen called it a "greek off"). Randy Chevalier, Adrian Perez and Brendan Fliris came up to bat. Since there were three invitations up for grabs and only these three people spoke up for them, they all "won." For some reason (he's my son), I only remember Adrian's pitch to build a bot to help with really hard searches.

The first presentation was given by Evan Cooke, CTO & Co-founder of Twilio (@twilio). He gave us a demo of TwilioBot and explained how he put it together. He also mentioned that originally they were using Wave Cron to insert async events into a wave. Unfortunately, Google has "retired" Cron for now. Instead, they are working on an OpenSocial RPC (OAuth-based) API to replace Cron (stay tuned).

The second presentation was by Sung Wu who demoed several Flash/Flex gadgets, including a Magic 8 Ball that shows a different "magic" answer when "shaken" (by clicking on it). All participants in the wave see the ball shake and see the same new answer. He went over the architecture of this gadget and a few code snipets, pointing out which piece was responsible for what. You can find the code and links to live demos here. UPDATE: You can also watch a video of Sung Wu's presentation recorded by Rich Reader (this was done impromptu and Rich did the best he could under the circumstances).

Half way through this event, Lawrence played the (short) Google Wave Intro video. Unfortunately, the laptop speakers were not up to the task, but enough people moved up close enough to listen to it. (I'd say, this video would have been more fun, and it's only two minutes long!)

BTW, this event was held at Dogpatch Labs, in Pier 38. I really liked the place. It felt like like a warm, fun place to work and hang out in.

Here are some (iPhone quality) pictures of the event.

Bay Area October Meetup (#BAGWave)

In meetup, we had a competition for invites, and several presentations, the first of which I found fascinating. The Palo Alto presentations tend to be more techie than the ones in the City.

Siamak "Ash" Ashrafi presented GoogleHealthWave, the first patient-aware Wave. He demonstrated how Wave can be used in patient care in combination with Google Health. As you can see in the video, a physician, a nurse, the patient and the GoogleHealthWave bot join a wave to review the patient's condition and prescribe a treatment. Any of the participants can ask the robot for, say, a list of allergies the patient may have or lists of medications the patient is taking. The robot also monitors the conversation and jumps in with warnings when, for example, the physician tries to prescribe a new medication that would conflict with another that the patient is already taking. What was even more mind-blowing is that Ash put this together quickly and got done with it at 2 AM in the morning of the event. This is, so far, a good example of the fact that things are moving fast around Wave. Very fast.

The second presentation was by Andy Rondeau who talked about a product he's working on, ObjectCloud, and how he found that Google Wave was not a good fit as a platform.

Then the folks from Ribbit gave a demo of their Conference gadget. James Williams, Ribbit developer, did an excellent job of walking us through their implementation. Ribbit seems to be making a pretty serious commitment to Google Wave. They are formally launching their RESTful API on November 5 in San Francisco. This event is by invitation only, so if you want to participate, you have to RSVP TODAY! at the latest. This is an all-day event, including hands-on coding from 5-9 PM (hard core).

Finally, Brian Kennish, Google Developer Advocate presented Advanced Wave Extension Topics. This was an excellent talk about how to create two-way robot-gadget communication and extension installers. You can find the code in his presentation here. In particular, take a look at the robot servlet, the gadget script and the capabilities file.