I attended this demo at Google I/O and am glad that the video is finally available. I’ve wanted to post it for awhile but Google put the video up about a week ago and then promptly took it down. Not sure why…?

I think Quinton Wall and Kris Muller did an awesome job with this demo. Quinton spent most of his time at Google I/O working the Developer Sandbox so it was good to see that Salesforce had such great representation at the event. Even Dave Carroll graced the event with his presence. Every time I stopped by the booth they were busy giving demos. I know the Wave Team was very happy with the presentation and I overhead them talking very positively about it.

The use case for the demo was perfect. You have a team working an Opportunity and quickly want to start up a wave to begin collaborating on strategies to close it. With essentially one click you can spin up a wave with all team members and attach it to the Opportunity for historical reference. You can even invite resources from outside your domain to collaborate. The cool part of the demo is that Wave can then post updates to the Chatter feed using OAuth. I wanted to do something similar with Wave a couple of months ago about but was not able to since, at that time, a robot was not able to add participants. Glad to see that when the new Robots API v2 came out, Quinton was able to make this happen. Kudos to Quinton! Great job!

Scroll into minute 19 to see the start of the Salesforce portion of the demo. For more info on the toolkit, check out the An Introduction to the Force.com Toolkit for Google Wave.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8jjIMGB1Fw

I’m back from Google I/O 2010 in San Francisco and am finally able to take a breath. There were over 5,000 developers, 90+ technical sessions, over 180 companies peddling their tech in the Sandbox and a steady stream of product and technology announcements. It was two action-packed days of deep technical content featuring Android, Google Chrome, Google APIs, GWT, App Engine, open web technologies and much, much more. I’m so glad to be working in the cloud with all of this new crap to play with! Here’s a short list of things that stuck out the most for me.

Vic Gundotra (Vice President, Engineering) stated that “I/O” represented “Innovation” and “Openness” and that was the theme throughout the two day event. Google relentlessly bashed Apple for their stance on a number of issues (no Flash, AT&T only, policed App Store, etc) and cemented their “kumbayah” of inclusiveness and standards. Google drove home their support for HTML5, Flash and a new open-source, royalty-free video format called WebM.

The Day 2 Keynote was awesome! One of the most riveting keynotes I’ve ever seen. You’ll definitely want to watch the video below.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY3U2GXhz44

Android, Android and more Android
This might have well been called the “Android Developer’s Conference” as most of the emphasis was on their mobile platform. I have to admit that they didn’t disappoint. All of Android sessions and labs were packed and some even turned away people. I attended a couple of hacker sessions including development best practices, game development and building REST clients.

Last year Google gave every attendee a Nexus One at the event. This year they were smart and shipped everyone a Nexus One or Droid a month before the event to help them get up and running on the Android platform. Then, to everyone’s surprise, they gave everyone on day 2 another Android device; the Sprint HTC EVO that ships next month. I’m seriously in love with this phone and am considering giving up my iPhone.

The major announcement was the release of Android 2.2 Froyo (Frozen Yogurt). Some of the highlight include:

• 2-5x speed increase with devices running the Dalvik just-in-time (JIT) compiler
• 2-3x browser speed improvement with the Chrome V8 engine
• Support for Microsoft Exchange
• Flash support
• Tethering and Portable Hotspot
• App Storage on SD - run app directly from the SD card
• Update All and Auto-update for applications

App Engine for Business
After two years, Google finally announced a service target specifically at small businesses. The service adds management and support features tailored specifically for the enterprise allowing them to take advantage of the core benefits of Google App Engine: easy development using familiar languages (Java and Python); simple administration, with no need to worry about hardware, patches or backups; and effortless scalability. However, some of the details, especially pricing, were fuzzy. My favorite was announced support for SQL databases (presumably MySQL).

• Centralized administration: A new, company-focused administration console lets companies manage all the applications in their domain.
• Reliability and support: 99.9% uptime service level agreement, with premium developer support available.
• Secure by default: Only users from the Google Apps domain can access applications and corporate security policies are enforced on every app.
• Pricing that makes sense: Each application costs just $8 per user, per month up to a maximum of $1000 a month. This is the part I didn’t quite understand as it must be for non-domain users.
• Enterprise features: Coming later this year, hosted SQL databases, SSL on the company’s domain for secure communications, and access to advanced Google services.

Google Wave
Over the last number of months the Wave team has made a number of enhancements to the service. They’ve added an extensions gallery, Robots API v2, Active Robot API and an anonymous read-only access for embedded waves. They made the statement in a number of sessions that if you tried Wave in the past to please come back and take a look at Wave now given the number of enhancements. Google also went so far as to make Wave available for Google Apps (Standard, Premier and Education Editions). Some features announced at I/O include:

• Run robots on any server — not just App Engine. They also announced that you can program robots in Google Go.
• Use a robot to manipulate and retrieve attachments within a wave
• Use the “Wave This” service to let your website’s visitors easily create waves out of the content on your site.
• Fetch waves on behalf of users with Wave data APIs

Google Web Toolkit
GWT sessions were quite numerous and popular and the Day 1 keynote revealed some exciting new features. VMware and Google announced a collaboration centered around the Spring programming model, SpringSource Tool Suite and Spring Roo. The highlights of the announcement include:

• Tight integration with SpringSource Tool Suite and Spring Roo to provide a polished, productive developer experience
• Innovative, close integration between Spring and Google Web Toolkit offering the ability to build rich applications with amazing speed
• The ability to easily target Spring applications to Google App Engine
• A compelling integration between Spring Insight and Google Speed Tracer to provide insight into the performance of Spring applications from browser to database

Google TV
This was the main announcement of the second half of the Day 2 keynote. A lot of people were surprised as there were talks of a Google tablet in the air. The keynote demo was very interesting as they ran into a number of glitches involving Bluetooth connectivity between the keyboard and set top box (no one thought of bringing a standard keyboard with a cable?). The idea is not new but they are bringing together some industry powerhouses (Sony, Intel, Adobe, Best Buy, Logitech and Dish Network) to bring the concept to market by this Christmas. TechCrunch has a really good review of Google TV.

Some other interesting announcements were:

• Google Storage for Developers - store your data in Google’s cloud
• Chrome Web Store - an app store for websites
• Google Prediction API - machine learning algorithms to analyze your historic data and predict likely future outcomes
• WebFont API - support for web fonts
• Google Buzz API - access to the Buzz platform
• Latitude API - a simple way to share your location with whomever you like

Apparently Google Wave is not dead. Google just released new functionality with the post Introducing Robots API v2: The Rise of Active Robots. These new features include:

Active API: In v2, robots can now push information into waves (without having to wait to respond to a user action). This replaces the need for our deprecated cron API, as now you can update a wave when the weather changes or the stock price falls below some threshold. You can learn more in the Active API docs.

This is a great new feature that allows robots to act independently of the wave. This allows Wave to receive notifications and messages with external events occur. Similar to Chatter, if a record is updated in Salesforce.com, this message can be pushed to all recipients in the wave.

Context: Robots can now more precisely specify how much information they want to get back from a particular event. If only the contents of the affected blip needs updating and you want to reduce your robot’s bandwidth, then you can specify the new ‘SELF’ context. On the flip side, if you do need all the information in the wavelet, you can specify the new ‘ALL’ context. You can learn more in the Context docs.

The new Contexts provide much granular control of the wave and how a robot interacts with it:

• PARENT indicates that the event should pass the parent data. Note that PARENT makes no difference to Wavelet events.
• CHILDREN indicates that the event should pass any children of the event’s level. For Wavelets, this context passes all child Blips.
• ALL indicates that the event passes all associated data.
• SIBLINGS indicates that the event passes any siblings. For Blips, this context will pass data for all sibling blips within the Wavelet.
• SELF indicates that the event only passes information pertaining to itself.
• ROOT indicates that the event only passes information pertaining to the root blip.

Filtering: In a similar way, with this new API, the robot can specify what events it needs to respond to, conserving valuable bandwidth — and ignore all those that don’t apply. You can learn more in the Filtering Events docs.

This new feature is great for programmers allowing them respond to events based up regular expressions.

Error reporting: Robots are now able to register to receive errors about failed operations, such as insertion on non-existent ranges. You can learn more in the Error Reporting docs.

You can now handle exception more gracefully and interact with users in a more user-friendly manner.

Proxying-For: Robots can now convey to Google Wave that their actions are actually on behalf of a different user, via the proxyingFor field. For robots like the Buggy sample, which connects with the Google Code issue tracker, this means that the wave can be updated with attribution to users on non-wave systems. You can learn more in the Proxying-For docs.

This new features allow your robot to “impersonate” a named user on another system. So if you wave needs to insert records into an external system, it can do so as a specific user.

These new features will make robots more user friendly and easier to use. I just hope they implement a way to restrict a robot to a specific domain.

One of the main complaints regarding Google Wave is that it is yet another system to check (Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Until (and if) Google Wave is integrated with Gmail, there are a few desktop options to notify you that you have new waves. I’ve been using the Google Wave Addon for Firefox for sometime but I’ve recently switched to Chrome so it’s no longer relevant.

The Google Wave Notifier project on SourceForge is maturing and is available for both Windows and Linux (Wine). With the notifier you can:

Here a small video demonstrating some of it’s features. At Appirio we are running our own domain on the Google Wave servers so it will be interesting to see if this notifier supports this feature.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEy-83DW4Wk

Now that our Beginning Java for Google App Engine book has gone to print, Kyle Roche and I have signed an agreement with Apress to write a Google Wave book targeted at developers titled, Programming Google Wave.

If you have any suggestions on what you would like to see, please let us know as we have no idea what to write <g>. Seriously, we’ve got some great sample robots and extensions for Python and Java but could always use some ideas.

Please post your ideas or comments below or on Kyle’s site!

Cross-posted at the Appirio Technology Blog

This is a small Google Wave robot that interacts with Salesforce.com to display contacts, accounts and opportunities. The robot is currently a work in progress as I’ve been busy with other work projects, getting ready for Dreamforce 09 and working on a Twilioforce demo. If you have any ideas for future functionality or comments, please let me know.

The robot is currently hooked up to my developer account but you are free to add it to a wave and try out the functionality for yourself. Simply follow the video and add the robot (sfdcwavebot@appspot.com) to your contacts.

You can watch this at full size at YouTube.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TBZBVGrQX4

There’s alot of buzz at Appirio around Google Wave. Apparently we know people at Google as we have our entire domain on Google Wave. We have teams using it for presales as well as project delivery. Kyle Roche gave a company-wide demo a couple of days ago and it raised a number of questions and topics for discussion.

First off, there is Google “Wave” the product and “wave” the open source protocol. The name stems from the TV series Firefly and movie Serenity in which they communicate via “waves”. Alot of the error and status messages in Google Wave come directly from these shows (e.g., “Everything’s shiny cap’n”).

One topic that drew discussion was “what is a wave”? There a number of entities involved in a wave (e.g., wave, wavlet, blip) and it take a few minutes to wrap your head around it. I thought I’d dive a little deeper into what actually is a wave.

Google’s developer docs visualize a wave as:

Wave – a wave is a threaded, living conversation with multiple participants that acts as a container for all other wave entities. Everything starts with and lives inside the wave and there is only one copy that everyone shares.

Wavlet – a wavlet is a threaded conversation spawned from within a wave. Wavelets can spawn additional wavlets and can be private or public.

Blip – the blip is the basic unit of conversation in a wave. Most of the interaction with Wave is inside the blip. Blips can contain other blips or content defined as documents. Multiple participants can edit a blip. You can see in realtime as other participants make changes. You can also see who made changes to the blip by the photos listed for the blip.

Document – content (photos, videos, PDFs, etc) attached to a blip is called a document.

So I got my Google Wave account last week and promptly invited 8 of my closest friends (ie the first 8 people that asked me for an invite). I’ve been on a couple of waves with Steve Anderson (Solutions Architect at Salesforce.com Foundation) and Jon Mountjoy (Community Manager & Editor-In-Chief at Salesforce.com) and Steve came up with an interesting use case for Google Wave.

Steve started a wave for a new blog post he wants to write regarding development best practices with Salesforce. I’ll keep the exact nature of the post under wraps but it’s going to be awesome! So Steve added me and Jon to the wave and started working on an outline for the article. At some point in time he decided that we weren’t smart enough for his topic so he added a couple of other developers to the wave. Everyone started adding notes to his outline and code and his article began to take shape.

I actually saw the wave about a day late so I was able to join in midstream and replay the wave to catch the flow of how the conversation evolved. Google Wave was built for collaboration and it’s pretty effective.

My wave account is jeffdonthemic@googlewave.com if you want to add me.

Tomorrow is the big day that Google distributes 100,000 previews to people that signed up for early access. I’ve been trying to get my hands on an account for awhile and even trying to pay off Scott McMullan didn’t work. I’m keeping my fingers crossed; I’ve got some really cool robots planned out with Kyle Roche.

The Google Wave Developer Blog had a really nice post today about some of the cool stuff that Salesforce is putting together with the Service Cloud. It looks very similar to what Kyle Roche outlined in his recent Appirio Tech Blog post, Creating a Salesforce Robot for Google Wave.

The Google post even mentions some work being done by SAP Research (Narinder’s old group?) and the NetWeaver guys. They have a short demo that shows how a conversation on Google Wave is augmented by a robot participant with access to SAP information. SAP entities — in this case transport requests — are recognised during the conversation and the transport request descriptions are inserted directly into the conversation flow. There is also another interesting demo that is hosted on the Wave site.

If you haven’t read the Salesforce blog you can find it here but I’ve embedded the video from the post.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ0b1CVRZHs