These days there are just so many great technology projects around it is difficult to focus for too long on one. For the past few weeks I have been heads down working with Chatter: producing articles, demos, and talking with developers. It has been hard to focus on anything else happening in the rest of the industry.
I took some time this morning to re-acquaint myself with a few of my favorite projects; One of these being Google Wave. With so many technology choices out there, I try to focus on those which converge, believing that convergent technologies are the ones which are more likely going to make a big impact.
It feels like a lifetime again that Dan Peterson and I were busily prepping for Dreamforce and our Google Wave presentation. I wanted to check out what was happening over in Wave land (my mind was already ticking about how I could combine Google Wave and Chatter). Good news is that it appears a LOT is happening: The Robots v2 API has been released, and Google I/O is rapidly approaching.
What I find interesting with the Robots v2 API is that the notion of robots is extending to something more akin to agents: they can participate in a conversation but can also now initiate their own waves or even perform cron-type scheduling. The idea looks like a great way to leverage some of the cool things happening on Google App Engine. The first idea that came to my mind when reading about the new robot functionality was extending the Wave robot we built for Dreamforce.
The current incarnation of the Wave robot facilitated a 'public' conversation with a user and a support agent. What if we extended this scenario to let the agent start a 'private' conversation using Chatter? Then write some code to have Chatter reach out to Wave, and start more 'public' conversations with vendors who may be able to collaborate together to solve a customers problem. Finally, all of the decisions of this conversation could be recorded as Tracked Changes through Chatter, giving visibility to the rest of the organization.
Sounds like a great idea, and a good example of where convergent technologies can be used in inventive new ways. Cloud computing makes this collaboration easier than ever before.