Posts Tagged ‘bots’

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Our Small World is Getting Smaller Still

In Post on 2010-04-03 by Joshua Tagged: , , , ,

I had my first taste of international communication today thanks to Google Wave. David Alviz runs an excellent Spanish Google Wave site called WAVEsfera. He keeps up with the latest bots and gadgets, and writes very well. A while ago it might have been a small problem that his site is entirely in Spanish. Translation has been around for a while on the web now, but it involved taking note of the site and plugging it into Babelfish or something similar. Now I have translation built right into Chrome. when I visit WAVEsfera, it asks if I want it automatically translated. Similarly, I’ve subscribed to the site in Google Reader, and it translates the site for me too! So far so good, no reason not to subscribe to international sites any more!

Blue Marble

Then I got to thinking. I’m getting in touch with some of the people who have read First Waves, and realised that it’s the perfect chance to try Aunt-Rosie, one of the original bots released with Wave. So I fired up a wave and added WAVEsfera and the translation bot. I selected the destination language and started typing.

It was true magic.

My amazement at watching my words translated as I type is like that of a caveman witnessing fire. the experience is so novel and potentially life changing. Imagine a world where language is no longer a barrier for communicating with anyone. Think of the potential for learning!

I’m full of excitement for the world of tomorrow enabled by real-time communication and translation. We’re so close to realising the universal translator of Star Trek that I can almost taste it.

In a site note: Inspired by my discoveries, I’ve enabled instant translation to each of my posts. I know I’ve had visitors from Germany, Ireland, the USA, France, Spain, the Czech Republic and Turkey just today! If you want to read First Waves in your language, check out the “[Translate]” button beneath each post. If you’re an international reader, I’d love to hear from you! Please leave a comment, or wave me at nunn.joshua@googlewave.com and don’t forget to add aunt-rosie@appspot.com!

Edited image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/ / CC BY 2.0

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Emaily Gets Waves Out of Wave

In Post on 2010-04-03 by Joshua Tagged: , , , ,

In yesterday’s open thread, I used Mr-Ray by wave.to to allow non-wavers to access a wave. Mr-Ray’s real purpose is to be an intermediary between Wavers and emailers. It does this by creating a simple wave interface when you add someone to a wave by their email address.

Well Mr-Ray wasn’t the first attempt to get Wave and Email to interoperate. A couple of Googlers used their “20% time” to create Emaily, a bot that behaves very similarly to Mr-Ray on the Wave side, but tackles the email side of things a little differently. When you add Emaily, it first creates an email address for you on its servers. Then when you add the address of a non-waver, it sends an email to that person with the details of your update and they can reply right from their email. I have to say, it creates a pretty seamless bridge between the two worlds from the email side. In Wave though, you get to see their entire email shoehorned into a wave, with “>” reply markers and signatures left in. For anything more than simple communication back and forth this could get messy.

Picture 1.png

The developers of Emaily have said they are planning to integrate Emaily even more into Wave by “rearchitecting Emaily into an application, which uses more of the internal Google services”. Hopefully this could be the beginning of actual built-in email capability in Wave that could speed the transition of more users from old technology to new.

Try it today. Add “emaily-wave@appspot.com” to a wave and send an email to a non-wave friend! Will extensions like Emaily and Mr-Ray help you transition to Wave any faster?

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Google Wave Births “Active Robots”

In Link on 2010-03-03 by Joshua Tagged: , , , , ,

An amigurumi robot

In my post yesterday I noted the increased push by the Wave developers to make it easier for the wave community to build and deploy extensions. It turns out this flurry of activity coincided with the imminent release of Version 2 of the Wave API, announced today.

The first new feature is the:

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.
Google Wave Developer Blog Announcement.

Read More »

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Submitty and Gadgitty — Two Bots to Help Wave Developers

In Post on 2010-03-02 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

Recently, the Wave Team have made a big push to publicise more bots and extensions. In a post to the Google Wave Help forum, Kylie announced that some users might start seeing a new Extensions link in their navigation panel. Then enterprising Wavers noted that anyone could get access to this Extension information with a search for [group:google-wave-extension-gallery@googlegroups.com].

Now Google have made it easier than ever to submit an extension to the Wave Extension review team using a simple bot.

submitty.PNG

Create a new wave and add the Submitty bot (submitty-bot@appspot.com), and Submitty will create a submission form for you to fill out. At the bottom are a couple of checkboxes. If you check either of these boxes, you’ll be prompted to fill in more information about your bot and/or gadget. Finally, you add the Extension Review Group (google-wave-extensions-review@googlegroups.com) to your wave to submit your extension.

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Karma: A Way to Keep Wavers In Line?

In Link on 2010-02-04 by Joshua Tagged: , ,

Here’s a neat little gadget/bot combo that could prove very useful for public waves if the system caught on.

Add the Karma Gadget and Bot to your waves and use it to rate your users (out of five stars). If users get consistently low scores, they will be automatically kicked from Waves that choose to turn on this option.

Karma Rating Gadget

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Wave To Posterous

In Link on 2009-11-10 by Joshua Tagged: , ,

Google fan Lookon has created a Bot to post to his Posterous blog, and written detailed instructions on how to do it.

It’s straight forward enough, add the bot and log in to the form it gives you. The next time you add the bot to a wave, the first wavelet gets posted at Posterous and it returns the URL for you to check.

Posterous seems to have the most diverse posting options of any blogging software available, and the addition of posting from waves puts it again at the forefront.

Now the bot needs to monitor comments and return them to the original wave for even tighter integration.

How to write a blog using Google Wave Robot for Posterous [Western Bridge over Google Wave]

(via Kerrie Anne’s Fridge Magnets)

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Trick or Treat [Extension]

In Link on 2009-11-01 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

From the Google Wave Developer Blog

Trick or Treat Extension

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Add characters quickly to a wave

In Link on 2009-10-27 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

Wave has a WYSIWYG interface for styling your blips. For those of us used to working on the web however, the default Bold/Italic/Dot-point tools can leave a lot to be desired. Many wont have a character pallet handy, or remember the windows/mac keyboard codes for producing various glyphs either. But if you’ve worked on the web long enough, you might be familiar with HTML/unicode character entities such as & (&) and •

If you need to add various characters to your waves, and are familiar with HTML entities, then the Character Entity bot might be what you need. Add character-entity@appspot.com to your wave, and whenever you write a character (in the format &code;) the bot will happily convert the code into the correct characters for you.

Here are a few to try:

  • © becomes ©
  • ↔ becomes ?
  • ∴ becomes ?

(A more detailed list can be found at Intuitive Systems)

Character Entity Bot [Google Code]

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Emaily: An important first step.

In Post on 2009-10-18 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

Emaily is a bot that sends an email alert for every new blip in a specified wave.

If your main inbox is your email inbox then this bot could be an important part of your wave testing, at least until Wave catches on with more of your personal network. Instead of keeping Wave open all day, have this bot send you a ping when anyone updates the important waves.

One day though I hope to see the flow reversed, and email will flow in and out of Wave instead.

Emaily [Wave Sample Gallery]

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Votely — Votes for public Waves

In Link on 2009-10-18 by Joshua Tagged: ,

Using the WaveVotely bot, people can vote on which public waves are useful or fun. The results are collated at the Waverz site.

Votely — Votes for public Waves

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