Google Wave
Aug. 9th, 2009 05:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mattbellI'm at the Google Wave developer qquasi-conference this weekend. It's one of many things I'm showing up to in order to get a good sense of what's going on in various parts of the software industry.
There's an abridged introduction to Google Wave on youtube here: (well, it's still 10 min, but that's down from 1hr20)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itc4253kjhw
It's basically a much more flexible, much more multimedia melding of online discussion forums, wikis, and emails. Google is encouraging a lot of third party developers to create embedded objects and chatbots for google wave. The development team for Wave is only three people, but I'm currently in a room full of 100 or so individual developers who are playing around with the Wave platform. Creating an open platform for an ecosystem of developers is a great way of getting lots of innovation without that much capital investment. Apple did it brilliantly with the iphone app store. They get 30% of the proceeds from any app sold for the iphone, and all they had to do is set up a platform for these developers to use.
Anyway, one of the interesting things about Wave is that because it's very easy to create chat-bots for any discussion, anyone trying to organize something over email can use a collection of these bots to help the discussion along. For example, there are bots that will add relevant links (eg a map for an address, the IMDB page for a movie you mention, definitions of technical terms, the answer for a simple question), bots that will help find a time that everyone can attend a gathering etc. When you start a discussion online, you can invite these bots along to help the discussion.
A few years ago I had the thought that in the future everyone will feel like a CEO because they will have a bunch of specialized artificial intelligences working for them. This seems like a first step towards that future.
There's an abridged introduction to Google Wave on youtube here: (well, it's still 10 min, but that's down from 1hr20)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itc4253kjhw
It's basically a much more flexible, much more multimedia melding of online discussion forums, wikis, and emails. Google is encouraging a lot of third party developers to create embedded objects and chatbots for google wave. The development team for Wave is only three people, but I'm currently in a room full of 100 or so individual developers who are playing around with the Wave platform. Creating an open platform for an ecosystem of developers is a great way of getting lots of innovation without that much capital investment. Apple did it brilliantly with the iphone app store. They get 30% of the proceeds from any app sold for the iphone, and all they had to do is set up a platform for these developers to use.
Anyway, one of the interesting things about Wave is that because it's very easy to create chat-bots for any discussion, anyone trying to organize something over email can use a collection of these bots to help the discussion along. For example, there are bots that will add relevant links (eg a map for an address, the IMDB page for a movie you mention, definitions of technical terms, the answer for a simple question), bots that will help find a time that everyone can attend a gathering etc. When you start a discussion online, you can invite these bots along to help the discussion.
A few years ago I had the thought that in the future everyone will feel like a CEO because they will have a bunch of specialized artificial intelligences working for them. This seems like a first step towards that future.
