Confessions of a Google Wave Fanboy

I have a confession to make, I am addicted. I can't stop, I've tried but I fear I am hooked. I am hooked on Google Wave. Quite possibly the coolest damn real time application platform I have ever seen. Yes, I know what you're thinking. It's true.

Like many who were given early Google wave sandbox accounts, I didn't see the purpose at first. The rather buggy javascript laden interface was actually kind of slow and at times cumbersome and worst of all crashed my browser all the time. This was for the most practical of reasons, I didn't know anyone else using the platform and it was an alpha that was changing on practically an hourly basis.

Then a few weeks ago something changed, suddenly I started to see public waves using the "with:public" functionality. All at once the value of the platform became completely apparent. The "with:public + keyword" allows you to both search for public waves as well as create real time topic listings of wave discussions. For example, the search "with:public tag:cloud computing" creates a listing of any discussions on the topic of cloud computing. This in essence completely replaces the need for a traditional mailing list or Google group. And best of all it's in real time. You can also link directly to your public waves, every thing in wave has a url.

The urls control all aspects of the interface, here is an example of a full screen wave url for "waverati" discussion I created. Basically it goes like this, interface_config:searchvar:waveserver:waveid

https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact,minimized:search:by%253Ame,restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BQJdniN4WN.1

So what is wave? Well let's just say it's hard to describe what wave is exactly, other then it's a lot of things all at once.

So here is my initial stab.

Google Wave is combination of Email, Twitter, IM, Wiki, iGoogle, Google Groups and the Facebook Apps Platform mashed up in real time.

For those who are Lucky enough to be included in the beta, please feel free to add me.

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I've also included a few of my favorite wave bots;

Polly the Pollster ([email protected])

Creates and distributes multiple choice poll questions.

RSSyBot ([email protected])

Adds an RSS feed to Wave.

TwitUsernames ([email protected])

Links @usernames to Twitter.com.

Blog bot ([email protected])

Publishes waves to blog posts.

Swedish Chef ([email protected])

Bork! Bork! Bork