Marvin Lee Dot Net

So I made a visit to Google’s office in Atlanta on 27th April 2010.

It was GTUG Atlanta’s second meetup, hosted by Chris Ramsdale.

This time around I brought a friend, actually it’s a colleague who tagged along and it was his first time attending a GTUG meetup.
Nice to meet GTUG ATL!

Google Atlanta is located on the 6th floor at 10, 10th Street Midtown.

Are you feeling lucky?

Visitors would need to sign up and print a sticker badge prior to attending events in the office.

This is Charlie Colin, the founder of GTUG Atlanta.
Beer and pizzas are served in the meetup.

Rick Thomas spoke about Google Wave and introduced briefly about it.
When he found out that most attending have been using Wave and some developing with it, he shared about how the inner messages are sent between servers (especially for multi party updating the same document). Very informative!

Rick also talked about some of the new features from Robots API v2 which was released a month ago especially about the Active API where robots can now run actions without having to wait for users interaction.

David Chandler who blogs at http://turbomanage.wordpress.com/ demonstrated his GWT project, RememberOneAnother and spoke about The 90-Day Startup with Google AppEngine: A Case Study (with GWT). David is really a fan of GWT and AppEngine, talking about the concept and advantages of GWT, admiring the AppEngine administrative console ,and promoting GWT over creating your own site and writing your own javascript.
If you are not using GWT, you will get very excited with GWT hearing about it from David.

Given the limited time allocated, Robert Cooper gave a short lightning talk about his personal project on developing his crossword puzzle Android app, Shortyz. I downloaded there and then and found that it has over 5k downloads already.
This is a great crossword puzzle app, as it can downloads puzzles automatically from a list of sites and even save it.
What you don’t see from his site is “Cooper” has made a Wave version for Shortyz using the same code! With minimal changes and customization on the presentation layer, he ported it over to Google Wave as a gadget (supports multiplayer, how cool is that?)

Their presentations are uber cool, I hope I can have a copy of their presentation slides.

Oh by the way, there seems to be a few asking if I’m working for Google.
The answer is here in this photo:

If I am one, you won’t see that I need a Google Visitor badge.
GTUG is something that is run by individuals who are using Google Technologies, just like Charlie who founded GTUG Atlanta and Nazrul of GTUG KL.
If you’re interested, just find a GTUG community within your locality and join their meetups.
Usually fun for developers or geeks.

Events, Google Atlanta, Google, GTUG, GTUG Atlanta

During the last GTUG KL Wave hackathon, I have made (hacked) a quick and dirty (yes, dirty) Google Wave robot.
I have subsequently posted about how to use the Google Wave Java API and some of the sample code from my Wave robot.

I have recorded the function of the Wave robot. Watch the demonstration video below, to see how the Wave robot functions.

Below is a screenshot of my very new Google Wave control center

Oh, by the way, I found out I have 13 more Wave invites!

If you want one, just leave a comment below telling me any one of the following:
1) What do you think of my sample Wave Robot
2) What Wave gadgets or robots idea you think would be nice
3) Why would you want a wave invite

Simple isn’t it. Let’s wave!

Add me :

Good To Know, Google, Internet, Software, Technology Google Wave beta, GTUG, GTUG KL, Technology Google Wave, Wave Developer Preview

What’s Google Wave?

Hmm.. looks like I have been covering a lot on Google stuff lately and ‘Google’ is the largest word in my tag cloud now.

But with the rate of cool stuff coming out from Google, I couldn’t stop myself.

Google Wave, as defined by Google, is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. What the heck does that means anyway?

It is still in developer preview stage, and not open for public use yet, just like the initial stages of GMail.

Lucky for me though, this time I get to have a developer preview access, thanks to my participation in Google Technology User Group, KL. More on GTUG later.

I have attached a lengthy video of the initial wave announcement + demonstration at the bottom of this post. It takes more than an hour to finish, but if you’re into innovation, it’s well worth it.

To me, I see that Google Wave addresses some problems in our current email usage. This includes an email thread which started with the first email of questions that goes back and forth between a few people, adding more and more colours to highlight the part of new reply and also trying to figure out the sequence of replies. Familiar?

Google Wave has a client or a browser based interface like your email software that lists conversations. Each topic is a wave and every reply is a blip.

Users can playback the wave in sequence or by frame to see how the conversation started up to the current point and also easily embed photos or videos.

It supports programs named Wave Robots, Gadgets and Embed API. Don’t let those names intimidate you, they are just programs for the conversational tool.

Robots are programs that can be added into a wave and become a tool in the wave. It is an automated participant, programmed to do things that can be done by participant, only that it is a Robot.

Gadgets are programs that can be added into the wave, something like miniature objects that can provide cool and dynamic contents. At this point of time, I would like to say it’s something like OpenSocial gadgets but ironically it doesn’t support OpenSocial API yet. Most of the gadgets are games.

Embed API is working the other way, where developers can put Google Wave into their website instead of putting their program into Wave. An example for this is extension to blog commenting system, where wave users can comment with their Google Wave accounts.

I don’t think it as a super duper cool technology that will change our lives as much as Google Search does, but gradually it might change how people communicate more than just plain email and instant messaging.

The video of the Google Wave keynote presentation in Google IO:

Google Wave will progress from developer preview to beta version starting September 30th. Another 100,000 wave accounts will be given on top of those having developer preview access.

If you’re interested with Google Wave technology, request for your access here. I heard those who will report bugs and submit feedback will get their accounts sooner.

I joined the GTUG KL 2nd Wave hackathon session last weekend and created a simple Wave Robot with Java. I’ll be posting about my experience of that soon, so stay tuned. GTUGs are user groups for people who are interested in Google’s developer technology. GTUG KL is the group in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Follow GTUG KL on facebook, and join the upcoming events. There might be cool lightning talks about cool Google stuff or even hackathon sessions for developers.

Google, Internet, Technology Google Wave, Google Wave beta, GTUG, GTUG KL, Wave Developer Preview