Google Wave Amazon MP3 Bot

The features that make Google Wave most interesting as a social platform are Widgets and Robots  (bots).  The Google Wave Amazon MP3 Bot is a great example of a recently developed robot application.

What is a Wave Robot ?  A robot is an application that is invited to participate in the wave just like you would invite a person. Once added to the wave as a participant, the robot performs a particular automated task. In the case of this robot application, the Amazon MP3 Bot, auto detects the artist name that one of the other participants types in and automatically converts identifiable artists, songs and albums into Amazon MP3 product links.

Rather than embed the excellent video demos here in my blog post, I would invite you to go to the Google Wave Amazon MP3 Bot micro-site blog. Not only is there a great Vimeo  demo of the bot in action, but the author also shows how to install a robot.  As many of you do not have a wave developer account yet and can’t try it out, you will definitely want to check this site out to get a taste of how Google Wave works.

Google Wave Amazon MP3 Bot

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Watching videos together with videowave gadget on Google Wave

In my previous post I speculated that Google Wave will allow new possibilities in how we share and experience music together. This also changes how artists/bands can potentially interact with their fans.  Last weekend I attended GTUG Campout: Silicon Valley (Google Technology User Group) which centered around developing gadgets and robots in wave. There were many interesting and inspirational development efforts at this weekend hackathon where the focus was to complete the development of a Google Wave gadget or robot in a single weekend (starting at 9 PM Friday and finishing by 4PM on Sunday). After the demonstrations by each of the teams that finished, during dinner, all participants were invited to vote on the applications presented to pick some winners. The 1st place winner was a Wave gadget  called “Videowave”, created by Sol Wu, Aaron Tong, and Nelson To.

The Videowave gadget allows real time video sharing and commenting in Wave.  So how does this work and how does it translate to social media and music? You can start a wave that contains the videowave gadget and load a YouTube video.  Say for example, you and your friends are big fans of Britney Spears or the Jonas Brothers and you are the 1st one to notice that a new Britney or Jonas Brothers video has been uploaded to YouTube. Being huge fans, you will of coarse want to share this with your friends. With Google Wave and the videowave gadget, you can invite your friends to watch the video together, all watching the video play at the same time and all able to chat and comment about what’s happening in the video, lyrics, dance moves, favorite parts etc. As you all chat, it’s all in real time with text everyone is typing appearing as it is typed.  Since the YouTube video is new and more of your friends are joining the Wave, you’ll probably want to watch it a few more times.

At this time, Google Wave is only available to those who’ve applied for and received wave sandbox developer accounts.  You can “sign up” now to hear more about Google Wave.  It’s probably a good idea to get on the list now as I doubt Google will turn it on for 50 million new users simultaneously.