Jeffrey Barr

I recently got an invite to use Google Wave and since I had no one to actually use it with, I decided to try out the API instead. Some initial thoughts are:

The API needs some work and better documentation.

• There is no way for a robot to access past waves, wavelets and blips. It can only access information entered after the robot is added.
• There is no way for a robot to actually manipulate the tags of a wave, only the actual wave and it's associated blips/wavelets.
• Finding out what is possible takes time because documentation gets limited as one traverses deeper into the API (eg what types of annotations are allowed).

Google is serious about support.

• The Google wave group is well monitored and I got answers quickly.
• there is a good amount of code available for many robots, extensions and gadgets which I found useful to help me understand how to do certain tasks.
• The instructions for getting started with the Java API, Eclipse and the Google App Engine were very good and easy to follow.

This brings me to my first robot, SemanticBlip. It takes all subsequent blips in a wave and highlights the Keywords as found by the OpenCalais API. Eventually, I'd like to add tooltips with subject area, relevance values and/or links to RDF data. I also look forward to having access to the wave tags to save topic information as well as the captured keyword data.

Here is a screen capture of part of a blip that contains the OpenCalais FAQ.

To use the robot add the address semanticblip@appspot.com to your contacts. It requires you to have your own OpenCalais license key which does get stored in the Google Datastore, so use at your own risk.

I'd love suggestions on things to add or change to the robot, so please leave comments.