I finally found a date for the Wave meetup in Copenhagen/København. I proposed the idea in this blog.

On the wave for the event “Wave meetup in København” 8 persons have indicated they are able to attend the meeting. So we will hold a meeting on November 25 2009 at 17-19.

The place will be IT-Universitetet i København, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 København S. Information about the location will be provided on the blog and on the Wave above.

The agenda at the moment looks like the following.

• The status of wave
• Why we see wave as interesting and our ideas of wave
• SAP and Enterprise Waving (Daniel Graversen)
• Usage of Wave by students (I hope)
• Planing of new meetings

Registration for the event on the Wave, or post a comment on this blog.

I found that the Wave client was changed today, it now looks like the Mute button has been replaced with an Unfollow button. I therefore thought, I would research the how the different functionalities.

• Archive. Archive move the Wave from you Inbox. You will be notified when the wave changes with the Wave pops up into your inbox. This would be the normal way to clean up in your inbox.
• Unfollow. Unfollow should be used when you don’t want notifications on your wave. The wave is removed from your inbox. Unlike when you archive the Wave, it will not pop back in when you make changes. So you can use this function when you don’t want to see the prolonged conversation. It will be useful when you have contributed your part to a discussion, and don’t want to participate in the discussion again. Other participants cannot see that you have muted the message, so if you are asked a question you are not informed. I would suspect that Unfollow will be an important part of cleaning up.
• Follow. Follow is used when you have Unfollowed a Wave or want to subscribe to a new Wave. Then you will be informed of changes, it will work like normal.
• Spam. Spam is used to mark the content as Spam. I’m not sure if any processing is done to mark the sender as a spammer.
• Trash. Trash is to mark the Waves as something you don’t care about any more. You will not be able to find the Wave again in your inbox. But it still exists on Wave, since everyone else can see the content.

I will need to be better at using Unfollow, so I’m not informed of all the changes all the time.

Image by: yoshiffles

Using wave in an organization can be a little challenging, when you don’t have Google Wave for your domain. Or if you would like to arrange a party or just be a group together. There are no problems if you only need to use one Wave, then you don’t need to invite all other participants to the new wave.

Google as implemented a group features in Google Wave. The function is build on top of Google Groups, so you have to create a Google group for each group you have. I would guess that this structure will create many new Google Groups with out any content in, since they will just be used for provision.

To create a new group follow these steps.

1. Create a Google Group on http://groups.google.com
2. Add the Google email of the users you want to add to the group.
3. Add the samplegroup@googlegroups.com to the contacts. Click the + sign and enter the group email. Just ignore the errors and press enter.
4. Add the group to the current wave.

I have created a video showing how this works.

To see content from the group, just search for group:demogroup@googlegroups.com. This will give all waves containing the group, so you can see what is going on in the group. When you are added to any of the waves, you will see the content in your inbox. This way it is much easier to find the Waves you have commented on.

A small issue is the wave username does not always correspond to the gmail username. So you need to find the users gmail account instead of their wave accounts.

I would also hope there will be an easier way to manage the groups from inside Wave, so you could just drag the users up to to the place they are using.

Using Groups is defiantly a thing, which needs to be improved for enterprise users. It could be a feature of Wave for my domain. On Wave for my domain it would make sense to be able to uses the groups you can define in the administration. These groups are your mailing lists or organization structures, so it will be a much more interesting place to administrate the groups. That way you don’t need to provision any other place.

For more information on Groups check out this Wave where the solutions is described in more details with a good FAQ.

Yesterday we had a problem with development of a gadget.

From the gadget we wanted to query a backend server running Ruby On rails. We used Json in the request, which is fairly easy to implement in Ruby and Javascript. The scenario looked like the following.

We used the code which looked like the following example, which exist on the page Working with Remote Gadgets.

We had also added some of the authentication types, because we thought a problem was the authentication. Somehow the request did not get the correct response back. So we had to lookinto how the gadget workes.

My thought was the gadget just called the webserver directly. We did intercept the Gadget calls using the Live HTTP Client for Firefox. When we used it there was a call to wave-0-opensocial.googleusercontent.com. The gadgets are also hosted on this site and there are other numbers where the content is hosted.

The request looked like the following instead.

So all requests to the remote server is done via the googleusercontent, which gives some advantages.

• Using the opensocial authentication you do not need the users to login to your applications. Authentication can be done by trusting Oauth or the opensocial content (I have not research it fully yet).
• Building an Appstore will be much easier. When you look at the code there are links to where the gadgets exists. So you could just copy the link to the XML code and then start using it. When all the gadgets have to be displayed from the googleusercontent.com servers, Google has the option of allowing certain url only to be exposed to the individuals how has paid for the service.
• All data is cached the googleusercontent.com servers, meaning that you will get fewer requests and less load on your sever.  You can bypass the caching by following this guide.

So we learned a great deal about the architecture on this problem. Our next challange is to figure out how we can leverage the Opensocial authentication to authenticate the users on our Ruby on Rails application. If you have any pointers please let us know.

At the Enterpise 2.0 conference yesterday Novell announced (wave from presentation) that they would launch Novell Pulse. eWeek has covered the release in Novell Pulse Launches with Google Wave Support for Real-Time Collaboration, with some interesting insights.

Novell engineers was excited about the Federation protocol and had been working on the product for a while. According to the eWeek article they worked on an internal project (Codename cockpit), but found that Google Wave was on the same path as they wanted to go. Google and Novell has been working together on making the protocol work, so Pulse will work with Wave. (Question will there be a Wave client certification?). At first glance Pulse just look like an ordinary group wave solution, but is has the Wavelets/blips and real time editing. It was a really smart move for Novell to use the hybe from Wave instead of creating their own protocol. It will defiantly get more attention that way.

Screen shot from the video. They have not rebranded the product on the video.

Pulse will be avaible in first half of next year as a SaaS solution and then in the second half it should be available to a on premise solution. It will be intersting for companies to have alternatives to using Googles Wave.

Novell has been making groupware for ages, so they know how users interact and groups. When you start pulse for the first time it has all the persons or groups you need to talk with. This is done by using the identify and user administrative systems Novell has. It will be more interesting to have a list of all the people, you are going to start conversations with from the first day you use the tool.

You are able to subscribe to a list of persons groups and get their status. This is much like twitter or the Esme project. If people write their problems then it will be easier for other to interact with them and help solve the problems. Wave has the option of saving searches, but it is not feasble to search for 10 people easy. Google Wave group functionality is currenly not very good, hopefully Google will be inspired by the content of wave.

To see a demo of pulse see this video, that gives a really nice view of how Pulse works.

The video does not show anything on how Robots or Gadget will work. It will be interesting to see if they will work. It can be one of the features which currently have not been developed, but they will also need to at least support the gadgets. If not it will be strange to collaborate from Wave to Pulse, if the gadgets cannot be seen from Pulse. Robots can have a seperate API since they can be developed inside the Enterprise.