Brian Flood has just published a robot/gadget combo that displays a map showing the locations of the wave participants using several different geolocation API’s and Google Maps. Here’s some information about robots and gadgets. I don’t have sandbox access so I can’t test it but here are some preliminary comments.
- This is the first time I’ve seen a robot/gadget combo. The robot, when invited to a wave, automatically embeds a specialized gadget. This seems to be a simpler way to embed specialized content for a typical user than actually installing a gadget, and it allows the robot to place additional structure on the collaboration (for example, permissions). Robots can also access and modify the enclosing wave, whereas gadgets can only access the gadget state. I believe we will see many significant add-ons to Wave being bundled in this way.
- We are starting to see how the underlying philosophy of Wave is affecting developers. In Wave, people can only access waves if they were invited to join them. This is in stark contrast to the current state of affairs in other social platforms on the Web (Facebook, Twitter). In Brian’s participant map, any participant must opt-in to share their location. We are gracefully entering the next phase of the Web – the phase of true participatory social networks, built on top of Wave.