I tested quite a bit of different Google Wave gadgets in my christmas calender last month. I tried 40 different apps with a large verity in their complexity and usability. Some of them did not have any useful functions or did not work.

I really liked many of the ideas created in the gadgets and some was really useful. It was fun to see how people wanted to impress with new ideas.

The quality of the gadgets and robot was lausy. Mine included. I believe that many of to my application must be improved. But with the limited option in the robot API hinders making layouts to shine. It also provide a hindering there is a lack of way the gadget/robots can work together. If there was a better way to make the gadgets/robot work together, the layout issues could be solved.

I will say that most of the gadgets except maybe the simpler voting gadgets all require extra work before they can be used by a wider audience. The robots where you need to write commands with # or ! as the only thing in blip, I doubt that my mother will pick it up easily which is required to get non tech savvy users on board.

One key to make it possible to get the robot to function better is to pay the developers. I guess most of the developers of the robots/gadgets I have seen just tried the protocol out of see if they could make something useful. And they can. But to make them look wave-y the gadgets need to look better.

To make the gadgets/robot complete we need to be able to get some better apis and more importantly be able to charge for your apps. Currently it can be possible to charge for the usage of a robot and with some development also a gadget, but it is a pain and will require to much of the user.

I’m therefore looking forward a Wave app store is created. It will be interesting to see if it only supports one time payments or monthly payments and maybe even corporate multi seat licenses. The wave app store will mean that more developers will start with developing programs for Google Wave, making the platform more attractive.

I’m currently only letting my apps be available to my mail list subscribers. We have a new scrum gadget that just need to be published. So sign up to the newsletter and try it out.

I’m using Google Wave notifier to get updates on new waves I’m participating in. It gives you an update at the same time a wave is updated.

Today I was informed by the application that a new update was installed. I really enjoy software that auto update and that you don’t need to do anything.  The new update is able to show how from my contacts are online. So when a new contact is online you get a popup with that user is online.

The new version has the following new changes.

Version 10.1.3.33

• Implemented online and offline notification of users in the contact list;
• Moved the manual online;
• Improved detection of installed browsers;
• Rebuild internet communication so that all web requests are done in the background;
• Increased timeouts for internet communication allowing clients with slow internet connections to correctly download the latest version.

I have seen the number of visitors on my site drop quite a bit. I’m not sure that I’m the only one how is seeing it. I guess that it is because Wave is not as novel any more and people how want access an ready has access. They can therefore create their own opinion about how it should work and how they can use Wave.

There as also be fewer announcements of software for the Wave. It could be because we was near christmas and it was not time for any news, but there could also be reasons like the users are not ready yet.

We saw last year that 12sprints(a SAP project) was released, which in some aspects looks like Google Wave but more structured. An Novell which created a property Wave server them self and then found they could support Wave instead and get more traction. I think there will be more products that lean towards Wave as a way to appeal to a larger community. The different softwares will make the usage more difficult to figure out for users and to select the correct tool for them.

I guess that it is the early adopters using Wave now and they are introducing their friends to Wave. When I was introduced to 12sprints the idea was to figure out how you will use it your self and then add your friends. With Wave it is a bit different, on waveyou just add you friends and then figure how you will use it. That mean you get a lot of different options on how wave can be implement. I have many different ways I’m using Google Wave and with different parties. There are many different use cases with Wave.

A problem with Google Wave is that it is seldom you notice any difference in the interface, and many of the changes are small to fix some bugs. Ie the Robot api has not been changed since 16 september, even there are some improvement that would be nice to implement.