Rating Bot is a simpel robot which helps with creating voting in best Web 2.0 style where you can vote on each blip. The robot is made by Przemysław Gajda.
You can add the robot using the address: rating-bot@appspot.com
An example on where the robot has been used is on the picture bellow.
The idea of being able to rate each blip is rather smart. It will make it to vote for ideas described in a full blip. So this links a lot to the polling gadget from yesterday. It does thou vote for different blips. So this will be use full when you have more to choose from.
It is possible for a person only to cast one vote for each blip. The way this has been implemented is by using annotation to store each persons vote. I have always used the Cache storage for handling metadata and then linked it to the wave or blip. But using annotations can make it easier to persist data. Then everything is stored in just one place. It would also be possible for other robots to interact with the data created.
You can have a look at the Java code behind the gadget at code.google.com. I could learn a little from the way this code is structured.
Often you need to create a poll with somebody else to figure out which option to choose. There is the Yes/no/maybe, but it does not help you selecting between many options. Then you will need to insert on gadget pr event you want to have.
I like the gadget because it is really easy to use. You have the option as administrator to create the list of candidates. It is possible to have more votes than one.
The gadget also have a nice graphical look, which makes it easy for users to start with using.
I have just completed the first sprint, where we used Wave to collaboration.
One of the gadgets we used was Taskboardy, created by fzuppa. It works like a taskboard on a normal sprint tool, where you have your stories and tasks. It is possible to move the tasks forward from not started, to in progress and to complete. It is possible to drag the tasks from one phase to the next.
The idea of the gadget is really nice, you have one place to monitor your sprint.
The developers linked the gadget, because it made them cabable to see what was going on. It also provide lots of visibility on what is the different tasks we are working on.
The problem was that it is rather deficult to monitor what is going on. You cannot see which of the changes has happended since last time you look at the board, you can use the replay but it is a bit more complex. The board also have tendeny to become quite large, so it is deficult to make it work fully.
The plan was to complete a review every day until Christmas, if you have an Wave related application that, you feel should get a review drop a comment. I do hope there are enough gadgets/robots or other wave tools to describe.
I was talking a person how was using Lotus Notes to administrate some of their interfaces towards the users. That made me think if Google Wave can replace Lotus Notes.
I have been using Notes 6.5 and seen some of their databases. I did try to create some databases/application back in Notes 5. I was not really great at creating the applications. Some of the companies I have worked with have been using Notes to mange parts of their enterprise. Some use notes to employees easy has access to create new customers instead of using the more complex SAP screen for it. Or to build workflow applications to make the approval process of new customers easier than developing the same in SAP. I have also seen Databases with extract from SAP, where Notes just was a different interface.
I have not see how the newest version of Notes 8.5 works, but a lot of improvements should have been implemented to make it even more user friendly. I have always seen Notes as a system which was not really user friendly. The previous versions of Notes mail solution was not worth using compared to outlook, but the new version should be better. So I have always thought the killer app of notes was the many databases you could create and not the mail feature.
Lotus Notes is like Wave a collaborative software, which helps many people work together. I don’t think it is possible to edit documents together. But Notes has the Instant messaging feture, which works nicely together with the email contact. I see Notes databases as a strong force that it has the option of synchronization to off-line work.
Can you create an application on Google Wave to perform the same as you would to in a Notes database? Lots of the examples that I have created like the workflow and form demo, es-robot could be examples an example of where an application was exposed on Wave instead of the ERP system. That is basically what Notes also does.
Wave is not a good container for lots of unstructured data. In the instance we want to have our customers in Google Wave, we can either create a Wave pr customer or we can create one Wave with all the customers. The best would probably to have one Wave pr customer. It will be easy to find a specific customer using the search function, for name or street. But if we need all customers in the northern part of Zeeland ie post numbers 1000-3000 it will be difficult. You could tag the customers with lots of different tags like area, this will require a structured approach to create the customers.
When you have found the customer you want to perform an action on there could be a form making it possible to create order in a new Wave or a link to the Wave of previous orders.
It would be interesting to have all orders in Wave. I don’t think that it will create so much value, because you can just find them but not do anything with them. I think that it will be a bit deficult to make a great Wave robot/gadget for analizing changing sales orders. From my experiacnes with sales orders is that they are quite complex, when you use scheduling and have different processes for handling them.
But back to the question if Wave will replace Lotus notes. I think that companies what to have their data more structured, which Lotus Notes supports best. In university I learned about the semi structured data, but I don’t see that it adopted on a massive scale. On a longer sight there might be a swift toward using unstructured data to store data unstructured, with the structured data in the ERP system. I think Wave could be one of the places where Notes databases should be dropped.
If the development APIs for Wave became better to make applications, it would probably be easier to expose your data in Wave.
The event was held at the IT University, which is a really fancy new building. Check out some of the pictures from the site. Thanks Jacques Holst for getting the room.
There was around 25 persons with different experiences with Google Wave. 5 had not used Wave, and only 2 had developed applications on Wave. Guess that includes yours truly. So there are not a lot of developers on Wave arround. What a shame, but makes the area much better for us.
I had an idea of people had knowledge of Google Wave, but since that was not the case I had to make a 15 minutes introduction to Wave. I should probably create a few slides shows for the 5 and 15 minute introduction of Wave, which can be used in such instances. I think the introduction was ok, though it would have helped if I had presentations for the amount of time.
Jacques gave a great presentation on how his class made notes in Wave. The whole class was on Wave and they could easily take notes together. It was to early to guess if the use of Wave for studes was giving better learning. Jacques said he feldt he learned more using Wave to take notes in collaboration with the others. They also uploaded the slides and commented on them in Wave.
I pitched Google Technology User Group Gtug.dk and hope we can gather enough people to start a chapter in Copenhagen. Please join on gtug.dk and we will see if we can start something.
Lastly we talked about if we should have more meetings. We agreed on having a next meeting sometime in January 2010. There will be focus on some development perspective, and it will be interesting to see what we can create.
If you where at the event, please comment on how you feel we can make next event better. Either hire as comments or in the Wave we created. Was the meetup.com site any useful or can we just organize the whole thing in Wave.
I was talking a person how was using Lotus Notes to administrate some of their interfaces towards the users. That made me think if Google Wave can replace Lotus Notes.
