Here it is! Our (belated) post about this year’s WWDC adventure. It was a high profile event and Apple did not disappoint.

Aside from the great tech talks, one of the highlights was the effort Apple put into polishing the event. The video below shows a wall of monitors - but this is no ordinary wall of monitors. This demo consists of an array of iPhone app icons dropping into place at a rate of speed that corresponds to their real-time sales. I thought the arrangement by color was a nice touch. I had the opportunity to speak with one of the engineers who worked on this and I was quite impressed with the amount of work that went into it. It was a stunning opener that made me feel really welcome at the event.

Video: The App Store Matrix

The first thing I noticed when I reached Moscone West via the path through the Yerba Buena Gardens was the huge line that started at the entrance, went down the length of the block, and turned the corner.  Fortunately I decided to go inside prior to getting in the line, which proved a good move; to get into the keynote at the front of the line the registration badge was required.  The lines are pretty much the single downside of the WWDC conference; although Apple reserves time spots near the end of the week for repeating sessions that fill up, which is nice.

Badge in hand, I headed outside and down the line to find my place at the end.  It turns out I would have been better off going the opposite way around the block, as the line nearly came all the way back to the entrance around the building.  Fortunately the lines never got nearly so long after the keynote was finished.  But the lesson was still valid: it’s worth getting to anything you really want to see at WWDC as early as possible.

The keynote was impressive. Steve Jobs is quite the showman. He has a way of getting people excited about even the smallest new features. Of course, the announcement of the new iPhone 4 was the most exciting point. Some of the other revelations are quite exciting from a development perspective, but are covered by Apple’s NDA. (If you’re curious, MacLife covered the entire presentation in great detail.)

The tech sessions at WWDC are generally great.  Some are geared for more experienced people than others, so picking and choosing the right sessions can be difficult based on your experience level.  I found that as a more experienced developer it was often a good plan to skip the first session in a multi-session series.  There are also many sessions running in parallel, only some of which repeat, so sometimes one is forced to pick between a few sessions that look interesting.  The Apple engineers at the sessions are generally the folks that are working on the code they’re discussing, so they’re certainly knowledgable. I got a lot out of chatting with them about various issues I’d run across while coding.

While the sessions are helpful, there are two more things that make WWDC a great experience: the labs (which are full of Apple engineers) and the other developers from all over the world.  The labs offer developers a place to go interact with Apple engineers on specific issues with their own code.  I didn’t come prepared to do this, so I spent most of my time in sessions.  However, looking forward to next year’s WWDC I plan to have some example projects for things I want some help with ready to go when I leave for San Francisco.  Lastly, talking to other developers in sessions, labs, and even the lines was generally a great experience.  It’s nice to hear what other people are working on, what problems they’ve run into, and what they’re currently trying to solve. Oh, and the cupcakes were a hit too!

All-in-all WWDC 2010 was a very worth-while experience for me and I hope to attend again in future years.  It’s great to feel like part of such a passionate development community.

As an independent development shop with apps on several platforms, we’ve been tapped by the FTC to provide expert witness testimony on the matter. We’ve spent several weeks giving testimony, helping the FTC understand mobile technology and the mobile advertising space as a whole. It is apparent to us from these discussions that the FTC is not in a good position to understand - let alone regulate - the mobile ad market.

The mobile space is clearly in its infancy and is changing rapidly. At every touchpoint with the FTC, we felt like the market had shifted enough that what we’d said previously was already out of date. Recent game changing events like Apple’s iAd platform - not to mention Alcatel-Lucent’s new ad system that bypasses apps entirely - make it hard to understand why anyone would feel that a Google/AdMob partnership will reduce competition. From our perspective, this acquisition is a positive, reaffirming event for the entire mobile industry.

The deal offers a number of key benefits to the industry:

* It shows that the mobile ad space is an industry to be taken seriously. This trend will draw a host of new advertisers to the space leading to the creation of new kinds of content, powering the development of new mobile hardware, and inspiring the creation of new, innovative ad networks.

* It shows investors that start-ups like AdMob have a viable exit strategy. This will encourage other companies to enter the space to work with the influx of new advertisers.

* It will usher in a wave of innovation in advertising as ads move from simple banners to interactive experiences. Apple has this vision for the iPhone. Google/Admob is well positioned to execute on it for other platforms.

* If this wave of innovation follows past trends, the influx of new advertisers will provide currently unforeseen revenue opportunities for developers across the board.

Our testimony focused on these points, the nature of the industry as it currently exists, and what might happen to the industry under various scenarios. We tried to emphasize our view that mobile advertising is an industry in flux - and as such, we strongly believe regulation now would be premature.

Unfortunately, the industry’s rapid rate of change means that by the time the FTC has its collective head around the industry as it stands today, the industry will have evolved into something very different. This, of course, is a serious problem with many intersections of business and government. ( Finance, anyone? )

With new developments coming to light nearly every day, the future for the mobile ad industry is bright - but it is also uncertain. We urge our colleagues at the FTC to reconsider their position on this issue, approve the acquisition, and move on to more serious issues.

UPDATE: 05/21/2010 - FTC Closes its Investigation of Google AdMob Deal

It sounds like science fiction - but as mobile devices make more and more computing power available on the go, cyberspace and physical space are beginning to intersect in some very interesting ways. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the trend toward Augmented Reality. AR aims to make the entire world digitally interactive - and this opens up some fascinating possibilities.

In its simplest form AR on a mobile device can be thought of as an overlay on the world. For example: You point your mobile phone at a building near where you are standing. An application on the phone can determine your position and the direction you are facing. Using this information the application can look up the address of the building, whether it’s for sale, even if any companies in the building are hiring.

Applications like Layar (shown above) or Wikitude are great if you are able to correlate information with geo-spatial elements. Often times however, this kind of information is not available - or is simply not accurate enough.

Virtual Bookmarks

In situations where the use of real-time location data is not practical, several other technologies come into play. Of particular interest are QR codes. QR codes are a simple method of encoding information in such a way that a mobile device can retrieve it. Think of it as a virtual bookmark in the physical world. Google uses such “bookmarks” extensively in its Favorite Places initiative.

QR codes are quite popular in countries outside of North America. In Japan, QR codes are used on everything from advertisements, to fast food wrappers, to buildings. They have also become something of an art form around the world. A standard QR code is shown below on the left. A stylized Japanese QR code is shown below on the right.

Although the right image has been stylized, both codes are machine readable. The left code will take the user to google.com, while the right code will take the user to Louis Vuitton’s Japanese mobile store.

In the US, QR codes are just starting to gain momentum with a strong showing last week at SXSW. Esquire Magazine recently published an AR focused edition that used a custom QR code. The same trend can be seen in retail stores in Texas.

RFID tags - which can be scanned at a distance - are also staring to move into the mainstream. There are even rumors that Apple might include an RFID reader in a future version of the iPhone. Notably, Apple did just hire wearable computing guru, Richard DeVaul for top-secret research.

Future Trends

As we move towards a more interconnected world, we can expect AR to get better and better. Google is leading the way with Google Goggles, an application for Android-based phones. Google Goggles allows users to search on theoretically any image and retrieve information from the Google search engine. Another Android app - Recognizr - can search social networks based on an image of someone’s face. This, of course, raises serious privacy concerns.

Despite those concerns, AR is a rapidly growing trend and will likely lead to numerous exciting developments as companies continue to explore the intersection of the Internet and the physical world. We’re glad to be along for the ride.

With the Internet-crushing hoopla surrounding the release of Apple’s widely anticipated iPad, not much attention has been paid to the exciting additions Apple has made to the iPhone OS to support it. Here we’ll explore some of these changes and discuss what they mean to publishers and application developers alike.

Apple designed iPhone OS 3.2 to support the iPad exclusively - so for now, the iPad’s slick new features are not available on the iPhone or iPod Touch. We’re hopeful that some of these features will slowly migrate over and Apple will release a combined iPhone OS for all devices. Luckily for those of us with large app collections, iPhone apps written for older versions of the iPhone OS should work fine on the iPad.

iPhone OS 3.2 provides applications with several new options for presenting content and receiving input from the user. As expected, Apple has introduced a new set of Human Interface Guidelines to go along with these changes. Below are the features that immediately grabbed our attention.

Popovers

A popover is a floating view that resides above the main application interface. They are designed to eliminate the clutter that might otherwise occur in applications with complex controls. You can see an example below:

The primary benefit of the popover is its unobtrusiveness. It appears only in response to specific user actions and can be dismissed when the user taps out of its bounds. This style of UI design will lead to interfaces that can become as complex as necessary for users that want to dig more deeply - but remain ultra simple for those who don’t. Popovers can also contain split views, discussed below.

Split Views

The split view is an interface element that allows developers to manage side by side content views. Typically, this would consist of a list on the left, with an action area on the right that changes based on the list item selected by the user. By itself this is not particularly innovative - applications have been designed this way for years. But by placing split views into popovers, Apple is treading new ground by enabling developers to create user interfaces that focus on quick access - and this is quite innovative. Think of it like a table of contents that can be accessed from anywhere in the application without changing screens. An example of a split view can be seen below:

As the iPad still does not support Multitasking, the benefits of the split view are confined to individual applications. We’re hopeful that as the hardware behind the iPad becomes more powerful, Apple will enable multitasking across applications. Someday, we’d like to see our favorite Mac application - Quicksilver - inspire a new generation of mobile device interfaces.

Custom Input Views

Until now, user input on iPhone OS based devices has been limited to a simple keyboard - and that could only be used with text fields. iPhone OS 2.2 gave Japanese iPhone users access to Emoji, an enormous set of emoticons popular in Japan. The interface is very similar to a keyboard. It can be seen below:

Apple’s new custom input views give developers the ability to take this sort of user input mechanism to the next level. Not only can new types of keyboards be created - developers don’t need to be confined to the keyboard model at all. We see this leading to innovative speech-to-text and gesture based input interfaces.

Gesture Recognizers

Gesture recognizers allow developers to determine what gesture a user is making on the touch screen. Before iPhone OS 3.2, developers were forced to create their own systems to handle gesture and tap recognition. This led to many apps behaving differently when the user dragged, pinched, or pressed the screen for an extended period. With the release of the iPad, Apple has (finally) wrapped the common gestures into an easy to use library. They’ve also included the most commonly used gestures from across all of Apple’s own products. This feature, along with custom input views, will likely lead to a new generation of iPad gaming apps.

External Display Support

The iPad can be connected to an external display device using a set of proprietary cables. Once connected, the external screen can be used by the iPad to display content. While the iPad itself is limited to a 1024×768 display size, the external display does not appear to be quite so limited. The external display functionality is used by the iPad version of Keynote - but without multitasking, this functionality can’t really be taken very far. Users won’t be able to watch movies on a big screen while they surf the web on the iPad, for example.

Core Text

In order to support iWork on the iPad, Apple has included a high performance text processing library in iPhone OS 3.2. This allows developers to include custom fonts and to create text layouts that go far beyond just a simple text document. In addition, developers can now extend the copy-paste widget itself. The current copy-paste widget is shown below:

By allowing developers to control how this widget behaves, Apple has opened the door to the creation of new kinds of markup. Users could use this control to make the selected text bold - or share it with their friends via Twitter or Facebook. Excitingly, there’s also a spellchecker with user submitted entries.

File and Document Support

Applications that want to share files, can now do so via a simple mechanism - a shared documents folder. When the iPad is plugged into a computer, this shared folder is mounted like a drive on the user’s desktop. An application can also register the types of files it supports, allowing apps to be automatically started when a file of the given type is opened by the user. This will be handy for users that receive many different kinds of email attachments. There are also indications that users may be able to upload files using Mobile Safari.

PDF Generation

Apple has made available native PDF generation capabilities for all applications. Users can now save application data, emails and other text or web content into a PDF file - presumably to be shared or emailed later. This will be a huge feature for applications where the user does a lot of data entry - such as a diet tracking or time tracking app.

Summary

The iPad is clearly the next generation in the iPhone/iPod product line and is aimed squarely at the growing e-reader market. Whether it will be enough to revolutionize the publishing industry the way the iPod revolutionized the music industry remains to be seen. The feature set is compelling, although the lack of Flash support - not to mention the lack of a full OS X operating system - is a significant drawback and may deter widespread consumer adoption. Still, the “Mom factor” might turn out to be the iPad’s greatest strength.

From the developer perspective, it’s refreshing to see Apple continually making available to the community at large the tools and libraries they create for their own apps. Despite the relative lockdown compared with other devices, the iPad promises to usher in a new wave of mobile innovation.

Note for the adventurous: Someone has apparently devised a way to simulate a number of iPad features on the iPhone - and even give it multitasking capabilities. If you try this and it works for you, let us know.

The notion of the iPod as a classroom tool is rapidly gaining traction. Unsurprisingly, Apple encourages educators to make use of their technology - and a number of prominent educators are actively discussing the pros and cons of classroom use. A recent issue of the “ezine” iLearn addressed many of these issues in some detail.

We’ve done our best to address the concerns of educators in our survey system while maintaining scientific rigor. Each device is checked-out to a particular user - who must enter a PIN code each time they begin a survey. User management is provided by a central web application accessible via the Internet. At random intervals, the device prompts the user to answer a series of questions. We built in support for Multiple Choice, True/False and Fill In The Blank question types, all of which can be authored via a simple web interface on the central server.

On the back-end, the server provides a number of administrative, authoring, and data analysis tools. Our goal with these tools was to create an easy to use interface for scientists and administrators while maintaining scientific best practices. To this end, all personal data is encrypted both on the devices and on the server. Data cannot be altered once collected and the reporting engine generates reports using only anonymized response data.

The response from the field has been overwhelmingly positive so far. Kids really like the idea of having an iPod on their desk, teachers like having an easy way to engage with tech-savvy students, and scientists like having a survey system that the kids will actually use.

For our part, we hope this technology will help improve the learning experience for everyone involved.

I was invited as a member of the Promise Neighborhood Research Consortium where I hold Concentric Sky’s seat on the steering board. The PNRC is an NIH funded consortium with a mandate to extend the mission of the HCZ to communities around the US. Concentric Sky is the PNRC’s primary technology partner.

The conference was well attended. There were over 1,400 people present and another 400 people on the waiting list that could not get in. 104 neighborhood organizations were present from around the country and I had the pleasure to speak to a large number of community representatives.

Several Obama Administration officials spoke at the conference, including:

• Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education
• Melody Barnes, President’s Domestic Policy Advisor and Director of the Domestic Policy Council
• Jim Shelton, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement, U.S. Dept of Education
• Adolfo Carrion, Jr., Director, White House Office of Urban Affairs
• Ron Sims, Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

The presentations focused on several key themes with a central message: focus on outcomes, evaluate approaches, make continuous improvements based on real measurements, and create long lasting partnerships with communities.

The most exciting thing for me was the interest in innovation - a willingness to look beyond what has been tried before and to look forward to evidence-based outcomes. This is very much in line with the PNRC, where I’m leveraging Concentric Sky’s strong understanding of data and social relationships to create new tools for tracking metrics and increasing community involvement.

Since returning from the conference, the PNRC has connected with other Federal agencies, such as Dept. of Education and HUD, to collaborate on their Promise Neighborhoods and Choice Neighborhoods Initiatives.  We aim for our technology tools to be brought to bear on an even wider scale. Where possible, we hope to spur innovation by making some of our tools Open Source. Our collective goal is to build a successful technology model that can be extended to poverty stricken communities around the world.

With the support of the Obama Administration and the AARA, we are well on our way.

Our friends at Google contacted us last week to invite us into the AdSense for Mobile beta program. AdSense is one of those subtle technologies from which Google derives most of its revenue. I’ve always been curious about its inner workings, so I signed us up right away.

After some discussion, we settled on Astronomy Picture of the Day for iPhone as the best candidate for the program. Google is looking for high traffic applications from which it can derive usage metrics before going live with the new system. APOD for iPhone generates millions of screen views from around the world, with the majority coming from North America.

We reviewed the SDK and set to work. The first thing we noticed was how differently Google thinks about content than our current ad partner, AdMob. AdMob provides a simple interface where the developer can choose to enable/disable ads by genre and can filter ads based on keyword or URL. The controls are coarse, but useful. Google, in contrast, prefers to have a target page on the Internet that can be crawled for keywords.

Having the content on the Internet gives Google a key advantage over other ad networks. The domain hosting the target page can easily be correlated with Google’s massive traffic and search databases, allowing Google to use factors such as PageRank to serve up the most relevant ad content.

This is great news for developers - fine-tuned keyword control and the ability to make updates programmatically are must haves in our book.

But what it means to advertisers is not so clear. On the one hand, SEO techniques might have some influence over which ads get displayed for which products. This would be a huge boon to the largest advertisers and development companies. On the other hand, disreputable domains and SEO “black hat” techniques could cause far more damage to a brand than was possible before. This means advertisers must choose development partners even more carefully.

The second thing we noticed was the amount of polish that has gone into the AdSense for Mobile SDK. It was solid, self explanatory, and super simple to integrate. We had it in place and online in less than a day. Comparing this to AdMob and our other partner Pinch Media, we were impressed. Even the AdMob SDK - known for it’s simplicity - took longer to integrate.

After a bit of testing with Google’s beta network, we decided the system was solid and submitted the app to Apple. Apple’s app review process has always been kind to us, so we hope to have the updated app in the iTune store towards the end of the week. We’ll post an update when the app becomes available.

[UPDATE] After a bit of back and forth with Apple, the update finally made it into the App Store today, 11/5.

The website is designed from the ground up with a social media focus, integrating Facebook, Twitter and a number of other Web 2.0 technologies. The audience is quite large - the site is in the top 10,000 websites in the United States by traffic and receives millions of hits. The social media footprint is also sizable - 313,289 Twitter followers, 131,253 Facebook Fans and numerous integration points with distributed social networks.

The project took about 5 weeks, which is breakneck speed for something this big. When assessing the initial requirements and timeline, we were really forced to think outside the box. Hard work might not be enough to get the site live by the deadline. How could we speed things up?

Although there was an existing site, we opted to re-architect from the ground up in order to take advantage of newer technologies. It may sound surprising, but this actually saved us a lot of time. After considering several web frameworks, we chose Django. It’s an environment that we know well and we were confident it was up to the task.

We began with a multi-server architecture, so the site could scale easily, and deployed the servers behind our own custom load balancer at Media Temple. We tried several different caching strategies, but settled on memcached in Apache as it let us handle the most users per server.

The structured content model we chose also saved us a lot of time. The new site layout was complicated by the existing website, which was really a number of separate websites bound loosely together. In order to overcome this, we created a simple content model and began migrating over the content, organizing as we went along. We scripted as much as we could, but with 30,000+ pages, there was a lot more done by hand than we would have liked.

With such a large amount of content, searchability was essential. For this we built a custom technology stack based on Solr, Lucene and Haystack. Then, to keep all the previous links pointing in the right direction, we created a customizable scheme of Django regular expressions and Apache mod_rewrites.

And, of course, all of this can be controlled from a robust admin interface.

We were working with an external design team, and found great synergy combining their design sense and our love of slick UI tools like jQuery. The Michael Moore folks were also a pleasure to work with. They had a lot of thoughtful improvement ideas as the development process rounded up.

Once the site was assembled, we ran some heavy load testing and were pleasantly surprised with the results. Our hard work and good architectural choices had paid off. A little browser compatibility testing, add water, and Voilà! Instant website.

To say it was an interesting project with some significant technical challenges would be an understatement. This was an all-out effort by some of our top developers to do the near impossible. It can be hard to accommodate such tight timelines, but our team rose to the task. Great job, guys!

The term “Web 2.0″ returns nearly 100 million search results on Google. But what is it really? Can you look at something and say definitively that it is Web 2.0? And does it matter? In this post we explore these questions in some detail - but to properly frame the discussion, we must start with a related question. What was Web 1.0?

A Brief History of the Internet

In the early days of the Internet, everything was text. There were no browsers as we think of them today. Using the Internet was a lot like using the Linux command line - extremely powerful, but not practical for the majority of people. There were a number of early systems - such as Gopher, WAIS and Hypertext - and each had its following. But everything changed with the introduction of Mosaic in 1993. Using Hypertext became a point-and-click operation, and the World Wide Web was born. The other systems faded away.

The Mosaic browser was eventually superseded by Netscape Navigator. Netscape sought to use its dominance in the browser market to establish a market for its server products. In Netscape’s estimation, control over the standards for displaying content on the Web would give the company the kind of market power enjoyed by Microsoft in the PC market. This fact did not escape Microsoft which soon introduced a browser of its own - Internet Explorer. And so the browser wars began.

Netscape was the very definition of a Web 1.0 company. It sought to build the “Webtop” ( as opposed to the Desktop ) and use that to push content to Internet users. This one-way flow of information is the defining feature of Web 1.0. Many Web 1.0 companies were built around the idea of web content as the outcome of a large up-front investment. A lot of these companies still struggle to adapt, even today.

The seeds of Web 2.0 were planted in the collapse of the dot com bubble, when such upfront investment was no longer easy to find. Young entrepreneurs sought to build businesses that not only leveraged data, but created it.

The Conversation

To a large extent, the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 was caused by a change in the way Internet users interacted with each other. Personal web pages, once popular on free sites such as Geocities, became blogs hosted on services such as Blogger. Blogger provided simple identity management and allowed users to comment on each other’s pages. It focused on what users wanted to do most - communicate.

As Internet users began to communicate directly with each other, companies that survived the dot com bubble - such as Ebay and Amazon - reinvented themselves around the idea that users themselves could be leveraged to create valuable web content with very little overhead. Many Web 2.0 companies are formed around this same model.

Of course, the best example of the Web 2.0 shift is the rise of the social networks: Friendster, MySpace and Facebook. These networks focused exclusively on making it easy for users to interact with each other and include their friends. Facebook took the lead by offering a platform that let freelance developers create small applications and widgets that could be shared among many users. Just as the users were creating the content, the developers were making Facebook a more engaging experience.

Today, such multi-directional information sharing has become the expected norm. Interoperability is key and nearly all social networking services are now interconnected. Users can post Flickr photos to Facebook with the iPhone and get comments sent back to them via Twitter. New services that do not interoperate begin to lose relevance almost as soon as they are released - thus the trend towards SaaS - Software as a Service.

The diagram below illustrates this point, mapping popular websites and services onto a map of the Tokyo subway. It’s an insightful metaphor.

This distributed conversation between users and services, along with the parallel trend of user centered design, is the essence of Web 2.0.

So What’s Next? Web 3.0?

Although the term Web 2.0 itself is the matter of some dispute, we can build a clear enough picture of what comprises Web 2.0 to begin discussing the future and Web 3.0.

As information becomes more accessible, it is also becoming more highly structured. Having a well defined structure allows units of information to be manipulated like variables in an equation. Projects such as Google Wave, Wolfram Alpha, and the Semantic Web seek to make the web computable, or in other words, machine readable.

Humans can easily carry out a task such as searching for a lower priced DVD because the information needed to make decisions is designed to be readable by humans. Once knowledge becomes computable by machines, tasks like this can be accomplished without human direction. Tim Berners-Lee, the scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web, said it clearly in 1999:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Today that vision of the Semantic Web is closer than ever. If current trends continue, the primary outcome of Web 3.0 will likely be great strides towards Artificial Intelligence.

Summary

To return to the original question, it’s not easy to say definitively whether something is Web 2.0 or not - but it’s not that important. What is important is that a generalization can be made about projects that share the common themes of Web 2.0: information sharing, interoperability, and user-centered design. Projects that share these themes are moving forward into a future of more accessible information. Projects that don’t will find it increasingly hard to keep up.

Nearly everyone uses email and instant messaging on the web these days, but imagine if you could tie those together with a wiki - and then add real-time playback functionality, on-the-fly language translation and drag-and-drop file sharing. Google Wave does all this and a lot more.

So far the only way to use the product is via Google’s own client at wave.google.com, however this access is restricted to developers who signed up after the Google I/O conference. Luckily, we have access and have had a chance to review the project in detail.

Let’s start with the basics and define a few terms. A wave is a threaded conversation. It can include just one person, or it can include a group of users. Waves may contain wavelets which are just smaller conversations. The actual message content is contained in blips. The diagram below explains this relationship a little more clearly:

In this diagram a group of people are sharing a conversation while two of the participants are having a private side conversation. Everyone’s messages to each other are in the form of blips, which can be seen by all participants in a wave or wavelet. In this way, Wave is a bit like a chat room.

With this in mind, we can begin to examine the user interface. The Wave Inbox can be seen below:

Wave features a left-hand sidebar for navigation and below that a list of contacts. The middle column is the Wave Inbox. This has a similar look and feel to Gmail’s inbox except it features the faces of all contacts who are involved in each wave. There is also an indicator to let you know about new content in the wave.

Clicking on any of the wave threads in the middle will open a pane to the right that shows the contents of the wave. This is where it gets interesting. If, for example, one wave is a message from a friend and you want to reply to it, there’s no need to draft a reply email. You can just start typing below your friend’s message and they will be alerted the next time they come online. If you’re both online, you can chat with each other in real time.

All the participants in a wave can not only see and reply to each other’s messages, they can also edit them. In this way a wave is like a wiki entry that can be modified by several people at once in real time. And when new participants are added, they can use the “Playback” feature to watch the wave grow and develop from the beginning.

Individual waves can be embedded into simple web pages and also accessed via gadgets - in Facebook, for example, or in a desktop widget. The Wave interface lets users know when content they are editing is public or if it is only viewable by the wave participants. This design opens a number of interesting possibilities.

But there’s more - participation in a wave can be automated with robots. A robot can reply to messages and generate new content based on what happens in the wave. For example, a Flickr robot could pull all of a user’s Flickr photos into a wave when that person joins the wave, or a stock price robot could look up a stock price every time a stock ticker symbol is used. Google even has a spell checker robot that not only suggests correct spelling while you type, it actually tries to put your words into context to make sure you’re using the right terminology.

Behind the scenes, Wave’s functionality is made possible by moving around small pieces of XML. These are transferred in real time between the participants using Google’s Wave Federation Protocol. To encourage experimentation, Google has open sourced the protocol and published their APIs.

Google is using several protocols to streamline communications between the different elements of the system. Communication between Wave servers is done with XMPP, while communication with remote robots is done using JSON. The big picture is illustrated below:

The key thing to note here is that the communication between the end user’s system and the Wave server is still proprietary. This will definitely limit the adoption of Wave in the enterprise space.

In addition, all of this data moving in real time has significant performance implications. Google has created a new data serialization technique called Protocol Buffers to address some of these concerns, but we’ve not yet explored it fully. There is much discussion in the development community around the pros and cons of this model, but to be fair, Wave is still in its infancy and the way Google is engaging with the development community is very encouraging.

To summarize, Google Wave seeks to combine a number of past and current communication techniques into a unified platform that will greatly simplify the creation of structured user content. It is certainly very impressive - and if it gains traction with Internet users at large, it could have a profound effect on the future of the Internet.