As most of you are aware by now, developers can write java robots that can aid a conversation that happens in google wave. A conversation is a wavelet and each reply in this wavelet is called a blip. There are some ‘getting started’ tutorials available out there that are of great help. These links should help you
Official google wave guide
Google wave getting started – Sort of an abridged version of the official guide written by Vogella.
Grasping the overall picture of a java robot is a little difficult. This is because there are no flow or architecture diagrams (at least none that I know of) that show you the sequence of events. Given below is a diagram that does that. Assume that you wrote a java robot that is meant to edit blips in a wavelet. The robot should provide a profanity filter service which will delete objectionable words from the wave. This is how the series of events happen.
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:
Blogger, which google acquired a while back is now ten years old. Google is celebrating the 10th anniversary by distributing presents. Its been quite a journey for blogger since its acquisition and the last ten years have seen tons and tons of blogs being added to blogger.
So as I surfed the web today, like any other good internet citizen I faithfully typed google.com into the browser address bar. Here is what I saw
Google promotes reader:
Gmail, google’s popular email service took an outage today. If you want to get a hint of what kind of impact that can make, check out google trends . The top 5 search terms are about gmail being down 
Google trends:
I am sure some posts will crop up with something negative to say. But show me an email service that uses ajax, tags your emails, provides chatting integrated with the browser, (oh ! I could go on) and is so reliable. When was the last time you heard about a gmail outage ? Some of the best services out there are not as reliable as the free gmail.
Google’s SLA was also broken due to the down time, which seems to have spanned about 2-3 hours. If rumors are to be believed, google is offering a 15 day service chargeback to its paying customers instead of a 3 day service chargeback that the SLA covers. That would work out to around 2$. Gmail labs also provides an offline service, so not all users may have been affected.
Apparently it might be able to. Google has launched a flu trend service that can be used to determine the trends behind a flu pandemic / seasonal flu.
The flu trends faq hints at being able to detect pandemic flu. The quote from the faq reads
How is Google Flu Trends useful for pandemic flu?
Google Flu Trends models are built based on historic flu surveillance data. When a new flu virus causes the same symptoms as seasonal flu, Google Flu Trends can detect if overall flu rates are significantly increasing. Some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu is happening, and are therefore good indicators of flu activity.
Google tries to understand search data and its related patterns and then determines if the search was related to a flu in any way. It then maps this search to geo data to find out how the flu spreads.