The Google Wave Developer Community Will Be Vibrant

After the initial euphoria upon Google Wave's arrival there has been a backlash of sorts against the enthusiasm in the pretense of not knowing what Google Wave actually is, or will do. But that has been among the chattering classes. The enthusiasm, if anything, has heightened within the budding developer community.

I suggested at the Google Wave API Google Group that code and culture/community are both important. I stand by that assertion. But that is not to say I want to focus on community talk and not code talk. Actually my primary motivation for joining the group has been to follow, and to an extent contribute to the code talk primarily to be able to spot trends in the developer community as Google Wave readies for the masses in a few months. Code talk is important to me.

One can but imagine what the Google Wave developer community will look like as it grows. I think some of that community's characteristics are going to be as follows.

1. The Google Wave developer community will be global.
2. Many top developers will make big money.
   
3. Google Wave's development will have an element of unpredictability. Once the genie is out of the bottle, there is no telling what twists and turns the developments will take.
   
4. There are going to be major social, political implications of Google Wave.
   
5. Google Wave MeetUps might sprout all over the place and might become the primary socializing tool among the Google Wave developers.
6. The Google Wave developer community will be numerically huge.
   
7. The community will have many corporate members.
   

In the mean time I want to do my homework to be able to participate in the code talk to the extent that I am in a better position to be able to spot trends.

Five Blind Men And Google Wave
A Little Trouble At The Google Wave API Google Group
Google Wave Developer Community: Asking For A Culture?
The Google Corporate Culture
Google Wave: Organizations Will Go Topsy Turvy
Google Wave: Enormous Buzz
Possible Google Wave Applications And Innovations
Google Wave Architecture: Designed For Mass, Massive, Global Innovation
The Google Wave Architecture
Google Wave Ripples
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Of Waves And Tsunamis
Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?
Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today

From The Google Wave Developer Blog

TwilioBot: Bringing Phone Conversations into Waves One of the powerful features of Google Wave is the ease with which developers can integrate it with existing APIs. ...... At the Post-I/O hackathon, I used the Twilio API to extend Wave into the world of telephony. ....... "voice waves." When a user adds twiliobot to a wave, the robot automatically finds and transforms the phone numbers in that wave into click-to-call links. .......... The subsequent phone conversation can then be recorded, transcribed, and automatically inserted into the wave as text with a link to the audio of the conversation. ........ Google has provided an amazingly powerful API, and I bet you'll have real code running in Wave in under an hour.
1 Wave Sandbox, 5 Hours, 17 Awesome Demos on the Friday after I/O, about 60 developers assembled down at Google HQ for the very first Google Wave API hackathon. ....... Evan Cooke kicked off the demos with an amazing app that showed off the Twilio API by calling a phone number from a Wave, transcribing the conversation to text, and pasting it back into the wave. Andres Ferrate, who had never before programmed in Python or App Engine, showed off the first monetizing extension: a robot that searched Amazon for DVDs and books, and gave him a cut of any purchases made off the links. ........... At the end of all the demos (too many to describe here!), Lars thanked all the developers and said, "I was so happy after seeing the first two demos, I nearly cried." ....... If you're a developer that's eager to hack on Wave, read through the documentation, check out the various samples, and make sure to request sandbox access.
The Making of the Sudoku Gadget
Google Wave API Office Hours
Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?

From The Official Google Blog

Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

In The News

Will You Be a Slave to Google's Wave? eWeek

Will Google Wave revolutionise free software collaboration? Free Software Magazine Where Android is an open system on closed hardware — and thus become semi-closed in the process — we have a chance here to develop Wave into a host of free and open tools based on the Wave API and using the Wave protocol. ........ imagine having a wave for the developers of a software project. ....... Hack-fests could include those unable to attend the live venue by having everyone use a wave — no longer need the best minds be excluded because they couldn’t book a flight ...... Google Wave could outstrip Twitter and Facebook by 2011.
Jargon from Hell Rides in on Google's Wave Gawker The open secret about Google's forthcoming product "Wave" is that no one knows what the hell it does.
Google Searches for Ways to Keep Big Ideas Wall Street Journal

Google looks to fast-track employee ideas CNET News Google is being forced to adapt to life as a big corporation with structure and processes ....... It's also grappling with the notion that it's no longer the automatic destination for Silicon Valley's most skilled engineers and marketers who are looking to do cool work and get rich. Companies like Facebook have lots of ex-Google employees within their ranks, and start-ups through the Valley are headed by those with a stint at Google on their resume.
Adobe Launches Online Spreadsheet, Web Collaboration PC Magazine

Adobe launches competitor to Google Docs ZDNet UK estimated real-time collaboration to be a two-billion-dollar opportunity for Adobe. ........ collaborating on documents directly in a fluid online environment
Is Opera Unite a Good Idea Done Badly for Google to Do Better with ... eWeek Opera is attempting to take advantage of the rise of social networking (the verb) and bake it into the browser ........ their desire was not to own the network, but to compete on it. ...... we don't know exactly what Google Wave will turn out to be

Web Semantics: Google Wave Jargon Wired News Wave .... Wavelet ..... Blip ..... children .... Document ...... Extension ...... Gadgets and Robots ..... Embeded Wave

Google Hunkers Down on Software Projects with 'Innovation Reviews' eWeek Eric Schmidt told Jessica Vascellaro he is afraid Google's normally hands-off approach to managing product teams is letting good ideas stagnate or slip out the door in the mass exodus of frustrated Googlers whose mental seeds can't find purchase in the giant Google garden. ....... The corporatization of Google continues. ....... Until now, Google has been pretty lackadaisical regarding the 20% projects and has treated employee defections with a shoulder shrug. ...... It will almost certainly scare off those who expect a "startup environment." Those halcyon days appear over

Google Scrambling After Launch of “Decision Engine” GigaOm Sergey Brin is personally leading a team inside the company to analyze Bing’s search engine and make changes to Google’s search results as necessary. ....... Microsoft is no startup, and has plenty of talent, money and marketing muscle to throw at Google — plus, for now, maybe a better product, too.

Why Bing is not Wave of the future ZDNet Asia Bing is a competent search engine that looks like Google search. Wave is an experiment in merging identity, data and messaging that looks like nothing on Earth. ...... the excitement is all Wave's. ...... Wave is pointing to the future, Bing to the past. ....... Microsoft talks of innovation, and it invests in research, but it defaults to stasis and duplication.

JP Rangaswami, Utterly Confused Of Calcutta (2)

JP Rangaswami, Utterly Confused Of Calcutta

I talked about my round one investors pulling out in February. Okay, it is not as bad as I make it sound. There is a possibility all of them might come back by the end of summer. Keeping fingers crossed.

JP is also the guy who introduced me to David, virtually speaking: David Gelernter: Manifesto. It was a mind blowing experience to me.

• Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 6: Musing about Role-driven Induction
• Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 7: Communities Facebook is not a “social networking” site. It is a community of communities. Now this is potentially of immense value in an enterprise
  
• Facebook and Bloomberg how “addictive” communications can made significant business impact
• musing about facebook and enfranchisement The pressure group, all 14,000 of them, became visible and vocal. Via Facebook. And Cadbury’s listened.
• Continuing to muse about Facebook and enfranchisement a small proportion of the populace are sufficiently risk-hungry, open-minded, bored, curious or just plain nosy enough to get involved in anything and everything.....I’ve had the privilege of being able to watch “Enterprise 2.0″, as it now gets called, experimented with, made a fad off, written off, subverted, faced off to and rounded up by lynch mobs a few times now...... After Facebook entered the enterprise scene, everything changed. ...... The organisation structures and management styles and financial processes and HR policies were all descended from the Assembly Line Ape. And the knowledge worker didn’t fit that evolutionary process. ........ these marauding smart mobs made it into the enterprise. Much worse, they’ve found allies inside the enterprise walls. Even worse than that, they’ve found allies amongst their customers and their partners and their supply chains. ........ it’s turned up in a nonhierarchical beyond-the-firewall way, and this scares many people. ........ The 21st century Trades Union movement for knowledge workers. ........ No longer held hostage by a single trade or profession or company, switching roles between employee and partner and customer. ........ In the meantime, do tell me why I’m wrong, why this post is so much horseshit, why you disagree.
  
• Social software is political science in executable form social software is a much larger category than things like groupware or online communities..... de-coupling groups in space and time ..... the internet has ushered in a host of new social patterns, from the mailing list to the chat room to the weblog. ........ A group of people interacting with one another will exhibit behaviors that cannot be predicted by examining the individuals in isolation
  
• Maybe it’s because I’m a Calcuttan….. In its simplest sense, a collaborative act is a bit like making a baby. It takes two people with somewhat different characteristics and abilities to produce one. ......... most examples of social software tended to fail in the past, because there was more effort expended on creating and maintaining the complex barriers and walls that exemplified the guts and innards of the institution.
  
• Fire And Rain and Sholay I’m one of those soppy sentimental guys who loves the “soft” rock that oozed out of the late Sixties into the Seventies, part folk-rock part acoustic-ish harder stuff......... [Isn't it nice when you get to that age when your tastes are genuinely your own?] ......... They’re re-making Sholay. ...... Sholay is the highest-grossing Bollywood film ever, and one of the few (maybe 50) that I’ve actually seen. ....... I can remember actually queueing in the rain for cinema tickets only once in my life (with Gary Martin, in Calcutta). The film I was queueing for? Sholay…. translated as Fire. In the Rain. Fire And Rain.
• No, but I think my secretary does This is what some captain of industry is meant to have said when asked if he used Facebook. ..... I’ve heard this precise phrase twice before. The first time, it was in the mid 1980s and the question was about PCs. The next time around, it was in the early 1990s and the question was about e-mail.
• Thinking about Citizendium and Wikipedia: Part 1 I must be Confused...... Experts can be bought, often just for the price of a little ego-stroking. Experts don’t like admitting they’re wrong. The worst kind of groupthink is when a bunch of experts get together. Experts have more to lose, like their status. Which is why they fight so hard to retain it.
• The Maker State: From self-buttering toasters to social software in the enterprise the madness of hiring intelligent people and then carefully draining every last drop of intelligence from them
• Little orphan albums My father’s lifetime was contained in one job. I will probably have seven. My children will probably have seven —- but in parallel, not like my sequential efforts. ........... In my father’s time a musician belonged to one band. In my lifetime musicians belonged to seven. My children will see musicians belonging to seven bands at the same time.
• Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 8: Musing about signals the “recipes” for the best companies start with “First get good people”. ....... People use all kinds of signals to communicate. From keeping doors open to shutting them. From answering e-mails promptly and diligently, all the way to “deleting them unread”. From being early for a meeting to not turning up. From giving their attention to not giving their attention. From listening to not-listening. ............ There’s something non-threatening, something non-invasive about the way we can signal to people using social software.
  
• Musing about 21st century irritations and concerns and the Because Effect
  
• A Saturday stroll musing about advertising
  
• Continuing to muse about advertising
• Musing about open access publishing and economics-of-abundance and DRM by looking up a word or phrase first in Wikipedia, I seem to be able to establish “baseline” information about the topic quickly and cheaply ......... Almost 3000 journals already use the new system: instead of charging people for access to journals, they charge researchers to publish in them. ....... The articles are then made available for free online ....... possibilities of using virtual worlds as means to a very specific end, that of empowering disenfranchised people.
• They don’t all use the same physics What’s possible in one virtual world may not be possible in another - unlike the real world, they don’t all use the same physics.
• London calling: Musing about crowdsourcing a case where the crowd will always beat the computer, where it was actually quite difficult to write a program to compile the list.
• A bug’s life It’s been a very long time since I wrote any code at all.
• None of the above
  
• Just pick one: Musing about toothpaste in Calcutta and its effect on enterprise information For the first twenty-three years of my life, I’d never known a home other than Calcutta. I’d visited other cities, sure, but never actually lived anywhere else. And I’d never left the country. .......... The culture shock I experienced wasn’t big and immediate and in-your-face, it felt more like a disjointed series of very small events over a long time. ........ One place I felt distinctly uncomfortable was the supermarket. I could not conceive of a whole aisle containing things to do with something like dental care. ........... the Facebook series (now on Part 9), the Wikipedia series (now on Part 2) and the Opensource series (as yet unpublished).
  
• Pottering about on copyright and Calcutta “We had no clue that we had to seek permission from the author,” Santanu Biswas, secretary of FD Block Puja Committee of Salt Lake, the community group which designed and paid for artists to make the tent. ...... [Mr Biswas, there will always be a house for you wherever I live.]
  
• Seeing is believing: macro microscope photographs of snow crystals Some of us are passionate about our faith and our beliefs. Some of us are passionate about science and things scientific. Some of us are passionate about both. (I belong to this category). ..... these photographs. ....... I’ve had a childlike interest in science all my life, and I guess I’ve striven to have a childlike faith as well. ........ “taken aback” is too weak;”fascinated” does not do it justice. “Entranced” is not enough. Neither is “spellbound”. Even the vernacular “gobsmacked” is woefully inadequate.
• Musing about “laziness” Some people get called lazy because you see them lounging around at work, chatting to people, occasionally even smiling. Dare I mention it, even laughing out loud. Some of these “lazy” people get a lot of “work” done, if you measure work in outcomes rather than in perceived effort. .............. many times the (exclusive) troubleshooters are the ones that cause the problem in the first place, be it a hard-coded value, duplication of code or a large complex method only they can understand.
  
• The Becuase Effect (sic)
• On toilet paper and cultural differences I used to think I’ve been a foreigner all my life. My father was born in Calcutta. So was I. But we “came” from the south of India, we were Tamils ........... Neither Calcutta, nor its Calcuttans, made me feel a foreigner; I made myself feel that way. .......... A foreigner at home. A foreigner away. A foreigner everywhere. ......... when I started seeing different cultures. I began to feel comfortable everywhere. ....... visit over 50 countries, and felt at home in all of them. ...... I was a native. Everywhere. ...... a native of Calcutta, of Liverpool, of London, of Dublin, and of Windsor: the five places I’ve lived in. ......... Years ago, when I used to market and sell offshore software services, I tended to open sales pitches with a simple cultural point. I said “The English and the Indian cultures can sometimes be seen to be separated by something as thin as toilet paper. The Indians think the English are dirty, because they use toilet paper .............. this post
• Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 9a: Meandering around with ecosystems Where I work, we’ve been going through the laborious process of bringing together our network, process, product and IT skills into one coherent “converged” unit. ....... every enterprise is a community ....... The entire opensource movement is an example of the value generated by open ecosystems. ...... When I started working in software, everything was proprietary and siloed. Way back in 1980, there was already a well-established offshore software industry. But it wasn’t much use. .......... [By the way, ten years ago, who would have believed that the day would come when Apple would be worth more than IBM? Other than Steve, of course :-). ......... the firewall was designed to form a perimeter around an enterprise, a thou-shalt-not-pass barrier with intensive checks ....... This will change. This must change. The overlapping communities model that is emerging requires it to change. ........... People will belong to multiple communities, those multiple communities will overlap in many and varied ways. Innovation will blossom at the edges of the communities, as professions collide, as the distinctions between some of the professions continue to blur. ........... The concept of the firewall will continue, but perhaps it will become more personal. Like identity. Like authentication and permissioning. ........ In addition to being nourished by information, the ecosystem thrives on an alternate source of energy. The interactions between the people. ....... a set of rights as well as duties. Liberty, not licence.
• Stuff I’m reading, part 142857 0.142857 (recurring) is the decimal representation of 1/7 .... 2/7 is 0.285714, 3/7 is 0.428571, and so on. The same six digits, gently moving around. Circulating. ...... 14 plus 28 plus 57 equals 99. 142 plus 857 equals 999. 1 plus 4 plus 2 etc etc equals 9
• Musing about music and politics Gracenote maps
  
• Musing about openness and security “most murders are committed by people known by the victim, so it’s best not to know anyone” ....... First we take living things and make abject skeletons out of them. Then we carefully build cupboards around the newly formed skeletons. And then we wonder why we have skeletons in cupboards.
  
• But Miss, they’re not listening to me I learn from the behaviour of “fresh” graduates. In fact I learn quite a bit from observing what babies do. All this does not stop me from learning in other, more traditional, ways. ..... switch from hierarchical to networked ...... in a networked society, everyone is a peer
  
• Learning from my children, part 97 we are going to see Generation M using things like Facebook creatively and differently, using the functionality in ways we do not expect. More importantly, using the functionality in ways that may not have been designed for, yet remain possible.
• I’m a Believer in the 21st century, product-driven advertising is fundamentally flawed
• Musing about Kurt Vonnegut and writing software A Man Without A Country
• Meandering around as a result of strange Facebook status messages Facebook is a multidimensional conversation
• More musings about what makes Facebook different “organic gardening”, this concept of having shared interests beyond work, but at work ....... there is a critical link between relationships and privacy
• Chewing over jhal moori and chicken tikka masala When I came to the UK in 1980, there were many things I had to get used to, and many things I got wrong ...... the scariest thing I had to overcome, in the context of culture shock, was this: getting used to Western cuisine ........ What I hadn’t been prepared for was the way people here cooked Indian cuisine. That hurt. It really hurt. ........ I was expected to order the “curry” on the menu. Which meant saying a little prayer and then manfully working through meat with apples and raisins, with a bit of stale curry powder thrown in, and if you were lucky, a large dollop of turmeric for colouring (which had the salutary effect of killing all other tastes for a short while). ................... even good Nepali fare.
• Cricket: The Sound and Numbers Game VVS Laxman scored his 112 all in ones and fours. .... 111/1, 222/2, 333/3, 444/4, 555/5. ....... For those of you who don’t follow cricket, all I can say is it’s never too late.
  
• Enterprise Blue Zero Using any device, anytime, anywhere, with whatever modality of communications best suits purpose. Collaboratively filtered, rated and ranked. Learning and teaching.

Jobsworth


Larry Ellison
Google's Newest Venture: Google Ventures
Bad Time To Start A Company?
The Big Money Is Not In Blogging
New York City: Transformed Forever?
Reimagining The Office
David Gelernter: Manifesto
The United States Of Entrepreneurs
Spamming Om Malik
The Human Is The Center Of Gravity In Computing
Visionary Entrepreneurs Will Recreate The World
That StartUp Mentality (2)
That StartUp Mentality

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