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.

How will Google Wave impact online Music?

Google showed a preview of Wave at Google I/O last month. A few of my friends were able to attend the event, but I was only able to watch the video playback of the Google Wave rollout. The key takeaway I would describe for the technology is “Real Time”.  Real time chat; it displays as you type (no waiting to type into a chat window and hot ‘enter’). Real time spelling correction is context sensitive.  If you can integrate Google Voice into the Google Wave framework, you’d have a powerful Unified Communications platform, but that would be the topic of another blog on another site entirely. Google rolled out the technology partly to encourage developers to begin creating gadgets and robots. A gadget is a program application similar to a facebook application.  A music player or video player would be good examples of gadgets.  A robot could be an automated conversation participant (like a character in a game).

So how will Google Wave impact the way we socialize around Music? To hypothesize around the possibilities, focus on ‘real time’. I would imagine that someone will create an internet radio or internet video widget that would allow real time chat among the listening audience. Imagine a fan page for a popular artist with over a million fans pre-announcing the release of a new single exclusively on a Google Wave-powered fan page? Do you think this would instantly draw the fan base over to a waves-powered social media site? I do. This would be a very good test of the platform’s scalability. Imagine a hundred thousand fans furiously typing away “Love the new song!” and similar messages all at the same time. Will it scale? It likely will. Google’s app engine technology allows for multiple processors in a cloud computing environment.

Google Wave could also be a viable platform for social media game development. So take the previous example and take it a step further adding some robots. Imagine playing a virtual reality game that you 1^st must reach the end of the game to play the newest music video release of your favorite recording artist. Follow the clues. What was the lyric from the 2^nd song in the 1^st album that opens that the door to the final stage of the game? Imagine the buzz created on the social media web site(s) that will have fans teaming up to solve the problem. What? The game new I was playing from the SF bay area and I just stumbled across two tickets to the next concert in my area? Fans chasing Avatars of the recording artists for a free poster? The possibilities are endless.  Could Google Wave be the basis of a social media and gaming platform that could seriously undo MySpace and possibly even Facebook? The potential is there. It will be very interesting to watch the Google Wave story unfold. It could significantly change the way fans socialize around music on the internet.