Google Wave On Your Knees

nospam@example.com (Ingo) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:54:00 +0200

Installing Google Wave on a laptop ist relatively easy and straightforward. You just have to follow the instructions here: wave-protocol installation. If you have any problems with Openfire such as non working admin passwords you may switch to the famous ejabberd which is a XMPP server written in Erlang. An installation instruction for this setup you may find here: using google wave reference implementation with ejabberd.

After you have a XMPP server running you create the certificates as described here: wave-protocol certificates. You just copy the *.cert and *.key file into your wave-protocol root directory.

Next you edit the ./run-config.sh and assign the proper values of your setup to the variables. Hint: don't forget to comment or remove the line at the top saying

echo "You must configure the run-config.sh script" ; exit 1

When all this has been done you may start the server:

./run-server.sh

If all gone well you find some INFO logging in your terminal. Next you open two additional terminal windows and start one wave client per window, each with a different username:

./run-client-console.sh mr-foo

and in the other terminal:

./run-client-console.sh mr-bar

Now you are ready to initiate a conversation between Mr. Foo and Mr. Bar. In Mr. Foo's window type "/new". This will create a new wave. Then type "/add mr-bar@your-domain". This adds Mr. Bar to the wave. In the other window you should see the wave appear. Then you may type something like "Hello Mr. Foo" there. Pressing enter will make the greeting appear in Mr. Foo's window. You've done a Wave communication in your laptop!

Below you find a list of the available commands in the console client. Just type a slash and the name and arguments of the command, then enter.



connect   user@domain server port  connect to 

                                   server:port as user@domain

open      entry                    open a wave given an inbox 

                                   entry

new                                create a new wave

add       user@domain              add a user to a wave

remove    user@domain              remove a user from a wave

read                               set all waves as read

undo      [user@domain]            undo last line by a user, 

                                   defaulting to current user

scroll    lines                    set the number of lines to 

                                   scroll by with { and }

view      mode                     change view mode for the open 

                                   wavelet (normal, xml)

log                                dump the log to the screen

dumplog   file                     dump the log to a file

clearlog                           clear the log

quit                               quit the client

Wave - Real-Time Social Networking

nospam@example.com (Ingo) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:21:03 +0200

What is that awesome social networking all about? In essence, it's maintaining a social graph and organizing data exchange over that social graph. On a reasonable abstract level, it's nothing more. The hype of social networking is decreasing nowadays, fighting some late battles with social gaming and stuff like this. Now it's nothing new or exciting anymore but the standard tool of communication.

In this very situation Google has launched it's Wave technology. In essence again, this is social networking on the next level. Wave looks like a browser based collaboration or group ware tool but in fact it's much more. It enables people to communicate and share documents in any way and - that's the point - all real-time.

Not enough real-time, it allows also to track whole histories of communications. Once brought together with geolocation you'll have an application reflecting any dimension of the human mind - time, space and communication.

One side of the coin is that with Wave Google is definitely the Microsoft of our days. This is the killer application the web was waiting for since the first days of dynamic content. An office suite or email client is a last century application, Wave is the new century. In conjunction with cloud computing - kind of a next generation operating system - Google is definitely on the top of the ecological pyramid. The other side of the coin is that Google reinvented social networking. There is not a single feature of recent social networks not included and seamlessly integrated in the Wave package.

So, if you ever think of integrating Wave into your social apps, you should be aware that in fact you do integrate your social graph into Google Wave.

ingo() -> tech. % Ingo Schramm - Wave

Google Wave On Your Knees

Wave - Real-Time Social Networking