Wave Summit - A few brief notes

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Okay I'm sitting here in Googles San Francisco office waiting for the start of day 3 of the Wave Summit so I thought I would put some notes down.

First up, wow. I'm beginning to think that the best thing to happen to Wave has been Googles move to close down their ownership of it. Since that time the focus has moved away from GWave towards the Wave In A Box project, which has in a short time brought us the Robots API, Data API, Gadgets and Federation. Obviously we are still in the Alpha stage however we are so very, very close to being able to host our own GWave like environments.

Secondly, Google is doing things right with regards to the Wave community. The whole focus is on making Wave a true community project rather than a Google project with the occasional outside contribution. To that end they are working hard to a) make sure those of us outside of Google are involved, and b) to ensure that there is a framework that can support the WIAB code and protocols after Google finally takes its bat and ball and goes home.

Nextly, people are still building Wave apps. Despite the hammer falling, people have taken the ideas and technologies and are running with them, creating new products and new ways to use Wave. A few of the demos we've seen over the past couple of days are below:

• Novell Vibe (Formerly Novell Pulse): Novells enterprise social collaboration platform. Hosted at the moment, with the possibility of future self hosting options.
• Wavelook: An outlook plugin for Wave. Yup, you can now use Wave through the worlds most used "enterprise" email client. This sort of integration is going to be key for bringing Wave to the people. If they don't have to switch between browser and client it makes it so much easier to use.
• Oracle Coherence: We  also had a demo of coherence as a wave store.

While the majority of those here are from the US, there are those like me who have travelled from afar. We have people here from Australia, Finland and Singapore.

Well we've got another day to go today then tomorrow and Friday are coding days. Wave ain't dead, it's feeling better, and it wants to go for a walk.