When you are a participant in a conference, Wave can make sense for you. I have some ideas regarding conference attendance.

When you are at the keynote, it is possible for you to open and edit the summary. In this way, you can write about your ideas on what is being discussed, and reflect on what others have written. This is something which requires a lot of mental capacity and multi-tasking; you need to follow what the speakers are currently saying, writing the content down and then comment on other spectators’ ideas on the keynote. The keynote is really interesting, because it talks about the direction of the company. There are a number of analysts, bloggers and journalists at place, who can write about how they see the keynote. It could be interesting for them to get comments from other people on the topic of the day.

For less crowded events like some presentations, you may find that you can create your notes live. Wave will allow you to create your own notes for each session, so other participants in the wave can see what is being written or if it is an interesting presentation. If it is possible to create good notes from your sessions you will be able to learn more. Other persons wanting to attend the same session at a later stage can see if it is interesting.

There will be some issues regarding rights of the content. I could imagine that some presenters do not like to see their content on the web, but it will hopefully be very few. The alternative is to blog about each session, where the same information can be disclosed. With wave you don’t need to have the content as super well formatted but you can let it be more in draft state. In this way you have your content the same way as other places.

Wave can also be used for less formal events, like finding places to go for dinner/lunch or just to start a networking session with some like minded persons. With wave, this will be easier if you can catch people’s attentions to the wave where you want to attract an audience about something.

Twitter is quite popular at conferences, where you are able to follow the streams. I have found, that I can only focus on one thing, what the speaker is saying or tweeting about what they have said. When I start writing my tweet, I lose focus on the speech and cannot see what is being said. It is also difficult to follow the twitter stream, to find interesting points. I read the other day that speakers also should follow the twitter streams, so they could respond in realtime to the event. I don’t think I’m able to speak and read from the twitter stream at the same time. Maybe wave will be easier to follow for a presenter, since it is just in one place all information exists. And you can see what people are writing at the moment.

I will try waving at the upcoming SAP Teched conference, to test if it is a useful way to work. You can follow the tag: sapteched09 and see the result of the experiment. A problem with the Waving is that not all participants have a Wave account, so it will only be a small subset who will use Wave.

The last challenge is that my new Asus Eee is very slow, when I’m working in Wave. I don’t think the small atom processer can run all the JavaScript. I’m not sure on how often it is sending data. Maybe the Wave client could be tweaked so wave can only sent data in every 5 characters, if the computer was to slow.

I have been working on creating some new robots or just brainstorm with some of my ideas.

I was looking at the scenario where a robot interacts as a virtual reception. I was introduced to this concept at Colayer. When you log on to the Colayer site you have the option of contacting different persons. If you could have one place to get a hold of the correct person it could save some time.

This scenario could also be interesting in Wave. This requires it is possible to search in the Company directory for persons related to i.e. the sales department or the just a general group. This is fairly simple with LDAP but there should also be some apis for for Google Apps Directory. There should be some context based analytics. I don’t know which tools/api could be used for figuring out what is being written in a wave.

I was previous looking for a way to draw designs for how wave could interact. I used my whiteboard to draw the layout. I was introduced to Balsamiq by Tommy Pedersen as a tool for creating mockups of applications. It is free to use the online version but it cost only $79 to get the desktop version.

I think it would be interesting to do a mockup of a wave application in it. My example is the following.

I think the Balsamiq gives a great way to draw mockups on how you want to create your waves. It is really fast go start with, and you can get a good feeling on what the application looks like.

For gadgets it should also be possible to make something like the same. Gadget can be described in the same way. It is even possible to create a wave like the following.

It is also possible to create a Wave-y look and feel from the layout. I could not find anything about creating stencils self, but the already supplied elements can create a good starting ground.

The question about if Google Wave is a productive tool was raised by Robert Scoble in the blog Google Wave’s unproductive email metaphors. I have been a fan of Robert precise way to formulate stories and raise questions like this.

Scroble mentions a lot of applications, which will be much better than Google Wave for collaborating more productively. For all different kinds of collaboration he will use the best suited version. The list he mentions is absolutely correct. What I don’t like about the list is that it requires different applications for different collaborations. This means that everyone should be on friendfeed or on the Wiki. Before the participants starts collaborating, they should decide on which platform to choose. This works nice if it is some tech savvy users, how knows the ins and outs of the applications, but for everyone else it is a large hurdle to overcome. With wave it is just one platform that you need to use.

Like all other social technologies Scroble allows all his followers to contact him, using the technology which really pushes the technology to the limit. For a wave perspective this would emulate very well how a really connected person like a boss or key business person would work. With email it is easy to notify ones boss with BCC, and then the boss knows he does not have to do anything. With wave on the other hand the boss needs to be a participant in the wave, so he can see what is going on. If you could add a secret person it will probably solve this issue. But when the participants continue to collaborate, the wave will continue to get in to the inbox of the boss, and it makes it more difficult for him to find the most relevant waves. The boss will see the text being written in the inbox, which can be distracting.

There is also missing the feature with wave, about how has the next action on an item. If I need someone to decide on something, I would like to mark that he is a key person in this wave. Otherwise he will just see the wave as a continued collaboration, on something he is note involved in. With email you know if something is in your inbox, you have an action on it. A work around could be to mark the persons users as the tag, then you just should search for tag:dgraversen or tag:next-dgraversen, how you would make the context. Idealiy there would also be a part where you can write, what action you expect from him.

I hate getting chats or pings on new waves. It of cause can see that, I need to take care for that wave because the person in the other might want a reply. But when the person is not on the wave anymore it does not make sense, then I just want the pinging wave to be a normal wave. If I need to take care of a wave, it would like to be informed that there is something I need to take care of. I would probably prefer something like when I get an instant message outside of my wave client.

I’m a huge fan of the Getting Things Done method, and try to implement as much as possible in my life. This blog as been written when I was online, but it is not always the case. With Wave it is currently not possible to be offline, but does it make sense to be offline when collaborating? I don’t know how this can be solved. But I when I do writing or thinking, I don’t want to be disturbed, and just focus on the task at hand.

If not Google solves some of these issues, it will create a marked for third party solutions, which could compete on having a more productive platform.

Image by Drpoulette

Extensions are an easy way to distribute you Wave applications. When the user has installed an extension the user can add robots or gadgets just by pressing a button. This is much easier then remembering the URL of the gadget or Robot. For robots it is pretty simple, since you can add the robot to your gadget.

What is even more exciting about extension is they can allow for an app store for Wave applications. It would be very interesting, if you could sell/buy as easy as you can from the Itunes App store. If it was possible just to make applications and then have somebody else to sell them, more developers would be interested in developing applications. That way you don’t need to finance you gadgets with ad words.

I was looking at the blog on How To Uninstall An Extension or Plugin on Google Wave. The blog does not give an explanation on how to install gadgets, so I have been working to find a way to do it. I should just have a look in the getting started wave.

I have been looking at creating my own extension and install them. In the sandbox there was a debug menu, where you can stall the extensions from. In the preview system you needed to find a place the gallery wave (Search for: Extension Gallery). From this wave it is possible to install the gadgets Google has accepted by clicking on a button.

This video shows how the gadget installer and uninstaller work.

I you are a developer and want to test your own extensions you can do it by installing the “Extension Installer”. When this is installed you can install new gadgets from the gadget URL. So this is the way you can test your application, before you send it to the app store. I don’t know you can share the applications with other or they need to install via the developer gadget.

Update: if you want to write an extension your self have a look at  Extension Installer XML creator (for Gadget)

I have been very pleased with how the production Wave system worked the first day.

Compared to the sandbox I enjoy working in the production system. It is nice to start it an almost empty mailbox, where you can start from. When you have said what you want you can archive the waves, and they will not pop in to you inbox.

I have had three (I’m a big shot) conversations with different peers in the wave system. It was easy and fast to communicate with them. The wave popped into my inbox, when somebody had any comments.

It would be nice to know if your peers was online, so you knew if the where able to respond. Or that you got a popup from the Google Talk gadget when a new wave was created for you.

There are some incoming waves that I have no reason to be a part of. I don’t know why these messages come into my inbox. It seem a kind of random. Is this the spam we will see in Wave. I don’t think anybody has created spam bots yet, thought it would be fairly easy to make.

I had a problem with my WP-BOT, which created a blog with the wave. The blog wp-bot.masteringwave.com uses the Wavr plugin. This plugin had hardcoded the some sources from the wave sandbox, because it nobody knew how it would be. I have created a but report on it.