Google Wave opened its doors to Google IO attendees yesterday, and I’ve been playing with it a bit since then.

We had the usual problem with a new communications system:  no one knows anyone else.  And so a thread was started on the google groups list, where people were listing their email addresses so people could add them to contacts.  I was unhappy with this as a solutions (scales like n^2, not good enough!) so I decided to solve it with the tools we had been given.  I would build a wave robot.

I used David Byttow’s Dummy robot as a template, and eventually got that to work on AppEngine (I had to copy a bunch of appengine files into the project, which is weird, and probably wrong, but it worked.)  I then added a web form where you can put in your @wavesandbox.com email address and get added to the robot’s guest list.  Then whenever someone adds “invitation-bot@appspot.com” to a wave, the robot invites the guest list to that wave.  It’s basically a way to create public waves, like a “new thread” button on a bulletin board.

It looks like some people are having trouble with wave corruption with the bot, but I haven’t seen it, it seems to work fine for me.  I think a bot along these lines could be very useful for class notes, etc, since it could automatically invite everyone who should have access to the wave.

Invitation Bot source code:  http://github.com/MikeSofaer/invitation-bot/tree/master