Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.
Thur 05.28.09 – Google I/O keynote was Lars Rassmussen, Stephanie Hannon, and Jans Rassmussen giving a demonstration on the new Google Wave that is currently in development and the team is inviting the attendees of Google I/O to participate in developing the product and open source code before public release.
Google Wave
Dev Preview
Mr. Lars & Mr. Jans Rassmussen
Ms. Stephanie Hannon, Project Manager.
They want us to develop products/apps with the Google Wave API.
Product, Platform, Protocol
Lars talks of email and communication messaging.
What would my email look like today if invented today, not 40 years ago?
Email mimics snail mail. Email systems can then collate the conversations into threads.
Waves : shared conversation object on a server that can be opened up by users. This is the model of how bulletin boards work.
Demo: Of hosted conversation on Waves.
The crowd is clapping about the live transmission of chat that allows folks to see the text as the typing happens. Also allows for private replies to a subset of participants.
“Email and IM type conversations now don’t require separate tools.” – Lars R.
“Did I mention that this is a developer preview.” – Jans
Shows how attachments would work in Waves: Drag and Drop pictures into Waves. Thumbnails show up in participants screen even before the uploads are complete. This feature needs Gears over HTML5.
[Jen note: The exciting part of many of the Google new offerings are how much they are using HTML5, which allows for easy adoption to more than just the programming community to develop apps.]
New demo on embedding from a fellow from the team, demo’s how to comment to the GAE blog code (the demo one) live from Waves or on the blog, and then the conversation can be continued on the blog or Waves and then anyone can join.
“Flame wars will be come so much more effective” – Lars
Jans demos live mobile Waves with G1 and Phones.
Jans demos editing and collaboratively edit documents.
Stephanie demos how to share meeting notes, Jans shows how to edit the documents. It has wiki like collaboration, but adds in communication.
We think the combination of collaborative editing and communication is powerful – Lars
Lars then talks about how source control will make it a powerful work production tool.
We have taken great care to make sure the content model… – Lars
We are gong to show you now the thing we had the most fun working on: Allowing more than one person edit the same object live without losing what the other did and both can see what they are doing. In the demo they have 4 people editing the same document. Supports multiple languages.
Lars sings the praises of Google Web Toolkit to be able program happily rather than worrying about the scripting.
Stephanie: Tools of Organizations : Folders, tags, Search, …
Extensions: Lars talks about spell checker and links. Links adds a link if you type google.com.
Lars: External APIs are just as powerful as the internal APIs.
Stephanie: Any Open Social gadget can sit in a Wave. We did all of this so we could create collaborative games.
Lars and Stephanie demo Waves with Twitter.
Bug tracking.
Lars: Open Port & Protocols: Any organization can build a Wave system, even in competition with Google, and share Waves across the boundaries.
“We think the world will be a much better place if everyone can build their own Waves system” – Lars
We are going to open source the lion share of our code, you can take that code and put it on top of your database and you will be up and running.
Lars and Stephanie demo live language translation for chat with folk who speak other languages.
“That finishes our demo” – Lars
Crowd very excited.
3 Break out sessions on Wave today:
Noon The API – Room 6
1:15pm Google Wave under the hood – Room 6
2:30pm Google Wave Client: Powered by GWT – Room 6
Product: http://wave.google.com
Platform: http://code.google.com/apis/wave
Protocol: http://www.waveprotocol.org