Status of Wave at the beginning of 2011

This is a cross-post from my blog on the Military Social Networking system milBook. I have also started a new blog on the new online space for FedWave here, which is restricted access for the time being.  

As a reminder, there is an online community for Federal Wave (FedWave) located here. You must apply for membership first at APAN.org. I will approve all reasonable requests for group access.

The Wave-in-a-Box (WIAB) initiative has made impressive progress, and now Wave has been accepted into the Apache Incubator. See also below for a current screen shot of the FedWave Working Model, which is running WIAB on a Windows 2003 Server.

Google's announcement regarding Waving in 2011 located here covers some key things about Wave. First and foremost, the wave.google.com main system (gwave) will continue to be operational until a suitable alternative is up and running. There is an export capability available for gwave, but currently there is no place to upload these waves. My guess is that this will not change for a few months yet.

The WIAB project is in transition from its current location to its new home in the Apache Incubator. The new location of the Apache Wave info page will be http://incubator.apache.org/wave/ but this is not currently an active URL. You can subscribe to the Apache Wave email list- instructions are located here. Even when the software development project is moved to the Apache site, the Wave Federation Protocol (WFP) Site will still be operational, as it will continue to refine and promulgate the underlying protocol that Apache Wave and other products (Novell Vibe, SAP Streamwork, etc.) will use.

The FedWave initiative continues, and is still seeking a sponsor and funding. Please see above for how to join the online community at APAN.org. New content is being added, so check back to see the latest!

Here is that screenshot of the current version of the FedWave Working Model:

 

The key thing to note here is that the browser being used is Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, with no special add-ons, (such as Google Gears) unlike gwave which does not support native IE. I have been able to access the Working Model using IE from a Government computer, although the port will need to be opened to access the site from Government networks. It is set up to use an authorized port (8005) which is important. Overall very encouraging.

I will publish another update once the transition to Apache Wave is complete. Please post your questions and comments below. Thanks.

Apache Wave Proposal (Apache Incubator)

This is a cross-post from my blog on the Military Social Networking system milBook. I have also started a new blog on the new online space for FedWave here, which is restricted access for the time being.  

As a reminder, there is an online community for Federal Wave (FedWave) located here. You must apply for membership first at APAN.org. I will approve all reasonable requests for group access.

The Wave in a Box project has submitted a proposal to the Apache Foundation to be admitted into the Apache Incubator. The proposal itself is located here, and an extract follows below.

Abstract

Apache Wave is the project where wave technology is developed at Apache. Wave in a Box (WIAB) is the name of the main product at the moment, which is a server that hosts and federates waves, supports extensive APIs, and provides a rich web client. This project also includes an implementation of the Wave Federation protocol, to enable federated collaboration systems (such as multiple interoperable Wave In a Box instances).

Proposal

A wave is a hosted, live, concurrent data structure for rich communication. It can be used like email, chat, or a document.

WIAB is a server that hosts waves. The best analogy for this is a mail server with a web client. WIAB is comprised of a few high-level components: the client and the server. They have the following major functionality (though this is not an exhaustive list):

• Client
  • A dynamic web client for users to create, edit, and search waves. Users can access this client by directly visiting the server in a browser.
  • Gadgets provide the ability to insert, view, and modify the UI -- exposing the Wave Gadgets API (http://code.google.com/apis/wave/extensions/gadgets/guide.html)
  • A console client that can create and edit waves via a command-line-like interface.
• Server
  • Hosts and stores waves. WIAB comes with a default storage mechanism. The administrators of the server may configure it to use alternative storage mechanisms.
  • Indexing, allowing for searching the waves a user has access to.
  • Basic authentication, configurable to delegate to other systems.
  • Federation, allowing separate Wave in a Box servers to communicate with each other using the Wave Federation Protocol (http://www.waveprotocol.org/federation).
  • Robots, using the Wave Robots API, (http://code.google.com/apis/wave/extensions/robots/) may interact with waves on a WIAB instance.

Background

Wave expresses a new metaphor for communication: hosted conversations. This was created by Lars and Jens Rasmussen after observation of people's use of many separate forms of communication to get something done, e.g, email, chat, docs, blogs, twitter, etc.

The vision has always been to better the way people communicate and collaborate. Building open protocols and sharing code available in an open and free way is a critical part of that vision. Anyone should be able to bring up their own wave server and communicate with others (much like SMTP).

We hope this project will allow everyone to easily gain the benefits of Wave with a standard implementation of Wave – in a box.

Rationale

Wave has shown it excels at small group collaboration when hosted by Google. Although Wave will not continue as a standalone Google product, there is a lot of interest from many organizations in both running Wave and building upon the technology for new products.

We are confident that with the community-centric development environment fostered by the Apache Software Foundation, WIAB will thrive.

Initial Goals

The initial goals of the project are:

1. To migrate the codebase from code.google.com and integrate the project with the ASF infrastructure (issue management, build, project site, etc).
2. To quickly reach a state where it is possible to continue the development of the Wave In a Box implementation under the ASF project.
3. To add new committers to the project and grow the community in "The Apache Way".

Current Status

The open source Wave in a Box project has existed in various forms for approximately 16 months (starting out life as the FedOne open source project).

FedOne began in July 2009 in order to accelerate adoption of the wave federation protocol, and serve as a proof of concept that a non-Google implementation of the wave federation protocol could interoperate with the Google production instance. It worked. FedOne's existence lead to a prototype by Novell that demonstrated federation between Google Wave and Novell Pulse (now known as Vibe). In addition, in May of 2010, SAP unveiled a prototype version of SAP StreamWork that federated with both Novell Pulse and Google Wave. All three systems interoperated, sharing real-time state, and gadget updates. In May 2010 Google released significantly more code (including the cross-browser rich text editor) to connect with other components that were built from scratch, resulting in a simple web client.

The project has grown over the last year to include many Google and non-Google contributions. The project has picked up steam in recent months as the direction of the standalone Google Wave product has shifted. At this time the Wave in a Box project enjoys very active development, with new features and functionality being added almost daily. The first Wave Protocol Summit was recently held and included developers from a variety of countries, companies, and organizations.

The code base is a mixture of mature core code from Google Wave, and somewhat immature integration code forming WIAB. WIAB is quickly becoming highly functional and is already in a very "demoable" state. The development mailing lists are very active indicating wide community support. We recognize that now is a good time to migrate to the Apache Foundation while the codebase and community is a manageable size. Assuming the current momentum continues, we expect strong growth in the code and community in the near future.

Meritocracy

The initial set of committers includes many Google employees, and there is an active and growing community outside Google contributing to WIAB already today. Google culture itself encourages meritocracy, and the community has always grown – and will continue to grow – in this fashion.

As shown by the initial committers list below, several members from outside of Google have already demonstrated interest, skill, and commitment to contributing to the project. These individuals have been recognized on those merits by the initial committers. Their selection as the first wave of new committers is a sign of the burgeoning meritocracy.

Community

Wave currently has a healthy community around waveprotocol.org, with conversations hosted at http://groups.google.com/group/wave-protocol. We plan to move this community to the Apache Software Foundation incubator.

Core Developers

The initial committers comes from a variety of backgrounds and includes many from Google. There are a few existing Apache committers amongst this initial group. We anticipate early future committers coming from places like Novell, SAP, companies related to the US Navy's usage of wave, startups in the wave ecosystem, and many independent individuals.

Alignment

The developers of WIAB want to work with the Apache Software Foundation because Apache has proven to provide a strong foundation with good infrastructure and support for developing projects in an open community. As WIAB continues to grow, the community will look to both reuse available Apache projects as well as look for opportunities to contribute back to the larger Apache community.

Known Risks

Orphaned products

Wave is a new means for communication, and thus it is still maturing. While the initial implementation (Google Wave) did not gain sufficient traction for it to continue as a standalone Google product, there are other related projects (e.g. Novell Vibe, SAP StreamWork), and several startups in the space that are continuing to build on the technology. In addition, the US Navy has contracted with four companies as part of evaluating using wave technology on every ship. The community itself is still growing, with several new contributors recently added.

Inexperience with Open Source

The initial committers have varying degrees of experience with open source projects. Many from the community are familiar with open source.

Homogeneous Developers

The initial set of developers does include many from Google. However, the project has accepted many patches from independent individuals, and some have already gained committership. Several companies have expressed interest and forty individuals participated in the Wave Summit.

Reliance on Salaried Developers

Following Google's change of focus for Wave in August, some of Wave's Google developers have chosen to continue working on Wave, but it is imperative that we continue to grow the community larger in the coming months.

Relationships with Other Apache Products

We currently use the following libraries from Apache

• Commons CLI
• Commons Codec
• Commons HttpClient
• Commons Logging
• Velocity
• Ant

We've also contributed the Wave Gadget implementation into the Apache Shindig project.

Documentation

Entry point for documentation of all the specs and designs. http://waveprotocol.org/

Wave Robots API http://code.google.com/apis/wave/extensions/robots/

Wave Gadgets API http://code.google.com/apis/wave/extensions/gadgets/guide.html

Initial Source

The initial source will come from http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/source/browse/. This consists of the Java code necessary for the client and server. These are already open source repositories licensed under the Apache Public License.

Source and Intellectual Property Submission Plan

Beginning with the initial unveiling, Google published a liberal patent license:

Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Google and its affiliates hereby grant to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this License) patent license for patents necessarily infringed by implementation of this specification. If you institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the implementation of the specification constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses for the specification granted to you under this License shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

http://www.waveprotocol.org/patent-license

Trademarks

Google retains all rights to the trademarks "GOOGLE WAVE" and the wave design logo, neither of which will be used in the Apache Wave project.

External Dependencies

In addition to the previously mentioned Apache dependencies, the initial code relies on the following libraries that have Apache compatible licenses:

antlr, aopalliance, asm, bouncycastle, cglib, dom4j, emma, gson, guava, guice, gwt, gxp, hamcrest, jackson, jdom, jetty, jline, jmock, joda_time, jsr305, junit, libidn, mockito, mongo-driver, oauth, protobuf, protobuf-format-java, protostuff, stringtemplate, websocket, whack, xpp3

Cryptography

We use standard crypto library methods available in java.security.*. Wave federation plans to uses encryption for sending deltas to remote Wave servers.

Required Resources

Mailing lists

• wave-dev
• wave-commits
• wave-private

It is possible that if the project does grown to include many sub project that we would split the mailing list up by sub project. Again we have flexibility.

Subversion Directory

https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/wave

Issue Tracking

Please help us setup a JIRA instance for both issue tracking and code review.

Other Resources

• a wiki (for the sites pages) (http://incubator.apache.org/guides/sites.html or a wiki http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/)
• code review on reviews.apache.org
• a server to run a dogfood instance
• continuous build bot

Initial Committers

• Alex North (Google)
• Anthony Watkins (SESI)
• Christian Ohler (Google)
• Dan Danilatos (Google)
• Dan Peterson (Google) 
• David Hearnden (Google)
• David Wang (Google)
• Ian Roughley (Novell) 
• James Purser
• Joseph Gentle
• Lennard de Rijk
• Michael MacFadden (Solute)
• Soren Lassen (Google)
• Tad Glines
• Torben Weis (University Duisburg-Essen)

Sponsors

Champion

• Paul Lindner

Nominated Mentors

• Santiago Gala
• Ben Laurie
• Upayavira
• Brian W. Fitzpatrick (emeritus on the Incubator PMC)

Sponsoring Entity

The Apache Incubator.

Comments are being sought on the proposal at this time. Please post questions or comments regarding the blog entry below.

UPDATE: Wave was accepted into the Apache Incubator on December 3, 2010. This will be the subject of a subsequent post.

FedWave Update

This is a cross-post from my blog on the Military Social Networking system milBook. I have also started a new blog on the new online space for FedWave here, which is restricted access for the time being.  

Three months have passed since Google announced that they would discontinue development on Wave. From my post in August:

On August 4, 2010, Google announced that they were going to discontinue development on Google Wave. This came as a surprise to much of the community of users and supporters of Wave, and sparked an outpouring of commentary on the topic in the Blogosphere. These postings included how Google doesn't do Social Media, how Google botched the rollout of the system, and how Google did the right thing by cutting their losses. All of these missed one point: the value of the technology itself.

In these three months, the Wave in a Box project has made impressive strides, with the current version looking much like the main Google product (see also below). There is still a lot to do, but much has been accomplished. In addition, all the information has been consolidated in one place. This project is moving fast, as the plan is to have a fully functional open source WIAB server ready for general release by the end of 2010. I will continue to monitor (and contribute) and will post updates like this one on a regular basis. 

The FedWave effort has made progress as well, with a Working Model of FedWave now operational in a limited mode. More information on this working model is in the FedWave group located here. You must apply for membership first at APAN.org. I will approve most requests for group access.

This virtual space is designed to facilitate online collaboration between different government agencies and with non-government entities as well. It has many different capabilities including blogs, wikis, document upload, and others. I selected this platform to enable collaboration with a wide group and to consolidate information in one place online. The site is a little sparse now, and I would welcome contributions and content.

Here is a current screenshot of the Working Model: 

FedWave Working Model as of 4 Nov 2010

I have let a long time pass between posts, but I will work harder to post more frequently. As always, please enter your questions and comments below.

Wave in a Box (WIAB) and FedWave

This is a cross-post from my blog on the Military Social Networking system milBook. 

On 2 September 2010, Google announced the way ahead for the open source version of Google Wave, now called Wave in a Box (WIAB).

Here is a quick summary of features for WIAB from that announcement:

• An application bundle including a server and web client supporting real-time collaboration using the same structured conversations as the Google Wave system
• A fast and fully-featured wave panel in the web client with complete support for threaded conversations
• A persistent wave store and search implementation for the server (building on contributed patches to implement a MongoDB store)
• Refinements to the client-server protocols
• Gadget, robot and data API support
• Support for importing wave data from wave.google.com
• The ability to federate across other Wave in a Box instances, with some additional configuration

The implications of this for the fledgling Federal Wave (FedWave) project are still being examined, but this could be a significant shortening of the way for this project.

I have been in contact with the Google team working WIAB, and below is a list of non-functional requirements provided to them that relate to the FedWave project. The requirements and the following response from Joseph Gentle (Google) were posted to the forum (list) on the Google Group for the Wave Protocol here:

1. CAC enabled (Government Smart Card w/ Certificates):
2. Army Knowledge Online (AKO) and Active Directory authentication:

These should be quite easy to implement.

The planned authentication system has 2 parts: An authenticator, which provides the client with a signed token, and a verifier, which verifies the validity of the token. I'm looking at using an RSA key pair to generate & sign the tokens. The verifier will be bolted deeply in fedone. For this, what we need is multiple authenticator implementations. Each implementation needs a copy of the signing key,
and a way to talk to the client (to authenticate it, and if its authenticated give it a token).

The first implementation of that will be a simple password check. I don't know anything about LDAP or smart cards. But it will be quite easy for someone who does know that stuff to hook it up.

3. Usable with mobile clients (iPad, iPhone, Android)

There are projects to make native clients for ipad, iphone and android. Others on this list will know more.

4. Automated installation/ Operation on Windows and Linux Servers:

The plan is for a totally hands-free installation that does everything except for federation. Federation will require a TLS certificate signed by a trusted party and an XMPP server (which could be bundled). We haven't looked in depth at making an installer. I imagine its not too difficult. Maybe someone on this list can help us out here?

5. Security/ Standards:
a. Encryption: Client-Server (SSL) and Server-Server (PKI): The ability to protect data in transit is important.

Tick. The client-server protocol will use SSL with a signed certificate. The server-server communication is authenticated as well, though I don't know the details there.

b. Authorization: once authenticated, users should only be able to access authorized waves/wavelets/blips. This would probably be done using the authentication system in some manner.

Yes. Not done yet, but it will.

c. No use of Google Web Tools (GWT)or other unapproved code: Don't take this the wrong way, but many of the Government security types are totally set against anything that uses GWT. They contend it obfuscates the underlying code and could be an attack vector into the system.

This is a hard one. At the moment the entire web client is written using GWT. We plan to make splash (a lightweight non-gwt client) work with fedone, though live typing doesn't work in splash. (There will be a lot of work to make this happen).

If this is super important to you guys, it might be worth making a native wave client, or waiting until native wave clients are made by 3rd parties.

d. Servers with full STIG (Security Technical Implementation Guides): STIGs are just settings on the server that lock down specific ports, protocols, and portions of the system in question for maximum security. They can cause things to not work, but have to be followed as much as possible or exceptions must be sought.

I don't know what that is, but making a document detailing which ports need to be open and whatnot should be easy to write.

e. Use approved Federal Government XMPP

There's no presence / XMPP-based chat support in WIAB. This is surprisingly difficult to implement.

6. Full code review/ test throughout development: This is more of a going-forward concept, but it is important from a security standpoint to make sure no "sleeper" code gets onto Government networks.

Pre-commit code reviews are standard google practice. We are doing code review for all new code added to fedone.

Fedone (and hence wave-in-a-box) code reviews take place here:
http://codereview.waveprotocol.org/

7. Full Presence/ Awareness (XMPP):
8. Email integration (in and out):
9. Embed waves in portal pages:

None of these things are planned for v1.0 of wave-in-a-box. I think they're all important, but not critical to having a working product.

10. Robust Search: The ability to search through waves and across federated servers for keywords and tags is important.

Search will work, but there's no current plan to make full-text search work across federated servers. (You will be able to search any wave that you have been added to explicitly, but public waves hosted on other servers won't appear in your search results).

11. Archive/ persistence of waves:

This will be done. Further, all operations are signed in the database(so archives will be tamper proof).

Thanks to Joseph for responding to my post. He has been very helpful. If there are other non-functional requirements I missed, please post a comment and I will add them to the list.

There was an office hours session with the Google WIAB team on 15 September 2010 and there was a lot of good information shared. They are making steady progress on the code, but there are still a lot of things the team has left to accomplish, including authentication, among others.

Informational Links:
The Google Group for the Wave Protocol is here.
The 20 Sep 2010 WIAB Status Report is here.
The WIAB task list is here.
The list of starter projects is here.

All the documentation has been consolidated on the Google Wave Federation Protocol site.

Note: many of the URLs in this post require a Google login and group membership to access.

The next step for FedWave is to install a working model of the FedOne server, so that WIAB updates can be deployed as development goes forward. I will be blogging that on milBook as I do the installation.

Thanks for your patience as I have assembled this post. I look forward to your comments and questions.

More Reasons to Use Google Wave

This is a cross-post from my blog on the Military Social Networking system milBook.

This will be the second of a series of posts that will look into use cases for Google Wave (or more specifically FedWave, which is the effort to use Wave in the Federal Government). While these use cases will have a military/ government focus, they have much in common with other articles that cover uses for Google Wave (here, here, and here).

NOTE: this and subsequent posts on this topic are strictly the opinions of the author, and do not represent any official Government policy or endorsement, nor are endorsed by any entity that is or may do business with the Government in any capacity.

Assumptions and Warnings:
- Not all the functionality shown in the following use cases is fully developed
- Some existing Wave features are not available in open source version of Wave (FedOne) including attachments and many extensions. 
- The use cases are for illustration only, do not represent any official sanction of the technology or its use by the Government in any form
 
Here are some more use cases, based on milBook comments/ contributions in response to my earlier post:

7. Task/Initiative Management: A simple management tool to track small projects, initiatives, or actions that do not require a full project management tool

8. Staff Action Tracking: Items that need to be endorsed by multiple staff sections can be collaboratively reviewed in order to see the comments or thoughts put together by another office and could collaborate on responses and reduce email overhead

9. Operations Center: Update briefings can be created and kept current in real-time for briefing senior leaders; being able to coordinate and collaborate using rich media will provide a clear common operational picture that is available to a multitude of organizations using trusted connections


I will expand on these and the first six use cases in subsequent posts. 


Thanks for your participation in the process, and please continue to let me know what you think about this.

Social Media and Collaboration in Haiti Earthquake Relief Effort

This is a cross-post from my blog on the military Social Media tool milBook.

 On January 12, 2010 a powerful earthquake shook the country of Haiti. The earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 and was centered about 10 miles west from the Caribbean nation's capital of Port-au-Prince, the USGS said. It had a depth of 5 miles. The death and devastation of this impoverished land has been heartbreaking to watch.

I have heard many stories of how Social Media and online collaboration have been vital to the efforts to bring relief to the victims of this disaster. I wanted to connect my other posts on the different aspects of knowledge management and collaboration to a real world situation where they have been used successfully to save lives and relieve suffering.

As I researched this, I found this article on mashable.com (the Social Media guide) that covers the 5 Social Media lessons from the Haiti Earthquake relief effort. They prominently mention the Red Cross fundraising effort using texting and Social Media to raise over $20 million for quake victims. Here are the five lessons (by Geoff Livingston):

1. Haiti Represents the Maturation of Mobile Giving
2. Online Participants Did More Than Just Give Money
3. Integration of Social with Traditional Media
4. The Story Was Emotional, but Not Fully Told
5. Immediacy and Impact Are Not the Same

There are all kinds of anecdotal evidence of Social Media use surrounding this event, but here are some numbers. This short overview by MarketingProfs shows the volume of Social Media use for the first few days after the earthquake. The Facebook group Earthquake Haiti has nearly 300,000 members, and the group Support the Victims of the Earthquake in Haiti has over 130,000 members (as of this writing).

There are many blog posts on this topic. Here is one that covers how CNN is relying on Social Media to supplement its traditional reporting and news gathering. Blogger Christian Borges wrote a post on what it was like using Social Media to get news of his loved ones in Haiti. This article in the Miami Herald also shows how Social Media has played an important role in connecting people after the earthquake.

Even Google Wave is being utilized to coordinate the relief effort. Despite the fact that it is still just a Pre-Beta system, it has been proven effective in enhancing communication. Michael Kutch and FedWave have been setting up multiple waves to support the heroes in Haiti. Michael has worked tirelessly to promote Wave as a mechanism to improve organizational effectiveness across the Federal government. Awesome job Michael!

While these stories are focused on online collaboration during these initial days of the relief effort, the challenge going forward will be using Social Media to remain connected with the people of Haiti during the long and difficult process of rebuilding their country.

I welcome your comments. Let us keep the people of Haiti in our thoughts and prayers.

Introduction to Google Wave

This is a cross-post from my blog on the military Social Media tool milBook, and also from a response to a discussion thread on the topic of Knowledge Management enablers.

I have seen many collaborative technologies over the years, but there is one that was introduced a few months ago that may provide a lot of the capabilities required for an online collaboration system: Google Wave.

My definition: Google Wave is a product that could replace email, instant messaging, and threaded discussion using a collaborative platform and an open-source protocol.

There is a wealth of information on this system, starting with the Google Wave Users Group on milBook and also on the Google Wave site. I will just throw out a few things that I have learned:

Google Wave is three things: Product, Platform, and Protocol.

Currently, the product is available in pre-beta form from Google. It will be provided by Google in a manner similar to Gmail, Google Maps, etc.

The platform is open source, and while I am not sure that the code is available yet, but when it is, you could stand up a Wave server and start using it with Google's blessing.

The protocol is the most promising part of Wave. It is set up so that multiple Wave servers can be federated (over a single port) so that there could be easily configured Joint, Interagency, Intergovernment, and Multinational (and .com) (JIIM+) collaboration. There is already a large group of Government Wave users, called FedWave, that is exploring the use of Wave in the Federal Government.

Below is a partial list all the features of Wave, but the key idea is that all waves are hosted on a server, can have multiple participants, and can have a lot of functionality embedded in them. This allows you to bring someone in and get them up to speed in a hurry, instead of trying to figure out which of the 20 emails in multiple threads to forward to them. Wave allows you to playback the evolution of the interaction, so a newcomer can see how the conversation came to be. There are multiple extensions to the protocol already, including collaborative map viewing, online polling, and many more. There is extensive search and tagging capabilities as well (it is a Google product after all...).

• Real-Time information
• Live transmission of any type
• Used as faster conversation
• Wave is used as new way of creating dialogue among group of users
• Google Wave contains gadgets and tools
• In Google wave there are gadgets like Wikify which can brings Wikipedia to your Google Wave account.
• It include tools for checking spelling and grammar
• It has a great futures like translating between 40 different languages by using Rosy Extension. • It has TWaves extension that allows the user to incorporate their tweet stream.
• It has drag and drop sharing of digital assets like photos, sound and video.
• Playback facility
• Open Source
• Easy embedding facility
• eBayBot - Search eBay in Google Wave
• Google Wave has a Public Timeline, like Twitter ( “with:public” )
• Webcam Video Chat and Much More on Google Wave with 6rounds
• Adding new people to the conversation easy
• Bloggy extension can Embeds the Wave into a blog
• Polly the Pollster : Creates any poll you can imagine I found this here.

This is a diagram of the components of a wave:
















I will cover this in more detail in subsequent posts. I have a few invitations left if anyone is interested. I have been kicking the tires for a few weeks now, and I think the Google team may have created a game-changer. Now we just need to make sure our People, Processes, Organization, and Culture are ready.