I wish I was at I/O to get the opportunity to play with Google Wave. I love the idea, and I think it’s limited only by what robots/gadgets makers think of doing with it.

jaggeree:

At I/O there were some really interesting Office Hours sessions where you could go and talk to the engineering teams about questions and issues. I wanted to find out a bit more about Wave and so went along to their APIs one. At the end of a really interesting chat an understandably tired Douwe gave me a mysterious looking card and invited me to come up to Mountain View the following day to hack on the Wave APIs… amazing, thank you Douwe.

I liked the ARGy nature of the mysterious tr.im URL on a card with nothing else on it, which lead you to a webpage where you could sign up.

And a set of e-mails telling you where to go and how to get into the Waves sandbox. I had a few meetings in the morning in San Francisco I couldn’t miss and was worried it was getting too late to really build stuff when I got to the Hackathon so I spent most of the journey on the Caltrain up there looking through the docs, pulling together some simple ideas I could do in the 2 hours I’d have to code and also writing some very simple guestimate code based on the docs.

The ARGy nature of the day carried on with fantastic lo-fi handwritten signs telling you where to go which I wished I’d photographed. When I got into the hacking room there were about 50 of us including the Wave team and it was a real honour and pleasure to meet Lars and many of the others who’d made this exciting new thing.

Within about an hour or so (glad I already know AppEngine, all Robots are currently implemented in AppEngine) I had the Robot responding to the text properly and then in a little while longer I had the latest 10 stories from The Guardian Content API being pushed into the right Blip within the Wave. We’ll be covering my code over on the Open Platform blog and we’ll put a screencast of it in action there and here soon. I called it Grauniady, partly because of The Guardian’s pet name in the UK of The Grauniad, partly because a naming convention seems to have come out of the Wave team of robots ending in “y” and partly because Lar’s demo of the spell checking was just so amazing, it all seemed appropriate.

It was a really amazing day, some fantastic demos from all the developers which ranged from a collaborative drum machine and a piano embedded in a Wave, to a robot from Twilio which looked for phone numbers and enabled a call between people, and recorded that call and embedded it in the wave (awesome demo). There were a couple of Robots which behaved like bots and responded to text.

Apart from the usual laptop/projector hookup mayhem Grauniady performed admirably and worked fine. Thanks to a Tory MP trying to claim for a “duck island” and Anna Pickard’s use of the word “cockweasel” in The Apprentice live blog I had some good funny examples to show (always good to hear laughter at something other than sketchy code). Obviously I was following Simon Willison’s convention of API demo’s involving animal names.

thanks to Pamela Fox for image above and for taking notes of the hacks in a wave.

Thanks to Kevin Marks for the perfectly timed lift back to Mountain View station (5 minutes later and I’d have been sitting on the platform for an hour). Love the double decker CalTrains, couldn’t stop grinning about them and the day on the way back. Totally memorable. Feel very lucky. Thank you.