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After a long wait I got a google wave account. yay ! Took the wave for a spin over the last few days and there were some interesting things that I observed. I wrote my first java wave robot and it was pretty cool. But an explanation of how the robot works should be left to another post all together. I will share my general observations in this post.

Deleted welcome messages:

The first thing that was weird was that welcome messages are often deleted by wave users or by bots. This is nuts. The wave welcome messages also have a lot of noise amidst them with quotes like ‘Please do not delete this !’ in bold red with a big font size. Wave still does not have a feature to disable edits. It is coming soon but it is not yet active.

Lonely waves:

Almost every one is complaining about this. They have a wave account but the 8 invites that were promised have not yet arrived (for some). The reason being that google wave is expanding its user base very slowly to avoid a massive crash of the system. It is also difficult to find waves centered around a topic. I tried to find java discussion but my searches ended up with nothing If you are a java geek and have a google wave account simply add your wave account name in the comments section. At least those reading this post will know how to contact you.

Miscellaneous / Tit bits:

• Google wave was pretty slow. But I expected that since this is a DEV preview.

• A funky sidebar was present on each window. I did not like this. I am used to clicking somewhere within the side bar’s empty space to move up or down. Fortunately the mouse wheel works with the side bar.

• Some robots are creating havoc. Editing comments left by others and deleting wave replies. This leaves some people vexed.

• There are some cool robots out there. I tried out the ISBN wave robot that replaces the ISBN number with a picture of a book and a link to O’Reilly. I can think of many applications where such robots can come in handy.

• Editing / deleting wave replies (blips) involves 2 clicks. You click a drop down and then select an option from it. Usability of the blip can be enhanced by placing small icons near each blip, which you can click to perform that action. Just a thought.

• Removing yourself from a wave discussion is not yet supported. You can add contacts without asking the contact’s permission first.

• There are wave ‘groups’ out there that discuss specific topics. You can subscribe to these wave groups. But sometimes, like in a forum thread, the discussion takes a U turn and towards the end of the discussion the participants are talking about something entirely unrelated to the root topic.

• Searching for waves is done in a variety of ways. You can search by tags / contributors / authors / wave ID / gadgets etc etc. Each wave can be tagged to particular keywords like a blog post.

This is just a tip of the ice berg. The java robot was very exciting to create and it was more exciting to watch it in action. There are some good tutorials out there that tell you how to write a bot but I see a gap where the flow of events and the overall picture of the robot is not brought out. I will try to cover that in my next post. You can subscribe to the RSS feed if you would like to keep an eye on it.