Whomwah.com

In late May last year Google first announced ‘Google Wave‘ at their IO conference. If you haven’t already, I advise you read all about it, and watch the introductory video.

Now I heard about GW early on, but didn’t really make any time for myself to understand the concept, or find out about the inner workings. In fact, like may people I know, I just thought it was an exercise in swapping invites, and once I had one, and had a very quick play, I didn’t get it.

Well, now I’ve read all the documentation, watched the videos, understood the concept, I tend to agree with the team. This could indeed be a gamer changer. We do need something to replace the increasingly old fashion email (40 years old), and this not only does that, but merges in a whole bunch of tasks and possibilities as well. It could be the future.

Now for developers, one of the things that GW comes with is the Wave API. The API allows you to use and enhance GW in a couple of ways. By extensions, or by embedding GW in other web pages.

So in order to understand the API more, I thought I’d build a simple Extension. In this case a robot, that when added to your GW conversation, will remove all the bad words it catches people using. This simple example starts allowing me to understand how the API works, and how I interact with Waves, Wavelets and Blips.

Now, it is a very simple example of what’s possible via the API and what will be possible in GW, but it’s a good example of how you get up and running with the Python SDK. I am of course assuming you have a App Engine account, and downloaded the SDK.

If you’d like to see the robot in action in a wave, just add the contact:

language-timothy@appspot.com

and then add this contact as a participant in your wave conversation you want monitoring. I only tried it in conversation with myself, but I’m sure it’ll be fine. The robot is also in the wave sample gallery.

As always, grab the code over at Github.