You’ve finally got your Google Wave invite and would like to enhance your Wave experience! Well, we’ve got help for you to learn about Google wave Robots which add so much more to your Wave discussions like live stock quotes, twitter handles etc. Read on to learn more.
Google Wave & Robots
Google Wave is an awesome tool that showcases the power of cloud computing and social networking in a single product. I’m sure that most of you may be familiar with Google Docs, the free cloud based office applications suite from Google. Google Wave takes the word processing aspect of the Google Docs app and blends it in with an instant messenger/email application, collaborative editing capabilities, and automated ‘bot functionality.
Ok, you got the word processor part, the email/instant messaging, and even the collaborative editing part, but what’s with bots? Since Google Wave is an open source cloud application, it allows its users to create automated software robots or bots that will do certain useful things and interact with the content on Google wave adding more value to it. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular Google Wave bots available and their functionality. Remember that all these bots are available for free and you can incorporate their functionality into your Google Wave anytime by invoking them.
Social Networking Wave Bots
twitusernames@appspot.com - Links @usernames to Twitter.com like @bala would take you to my twitter profile page.
Just add the above bot to automatically link any twitter handle with their twitter page, a nifty way to quote or refer to people in a conversation.
rssybot@appspot.com - Adds an RSS feed to a Wave
Certain Google Wave documents or waves are collaborated amongst several users and it gets difficult to keep up with the alterations to the wave, so why not use the power of RSS – use this bot to create an RSS feed for your Wave and you can easily keep yourself updated when you’re reading your RSS subscriptions. https://wave.to/projects/robots/rssybot
last-robot@appspot.com – If you are a music fan and user of the last.fm social music recommendation service, then use this bot to display any user’s last played song on last.fm
tweety-wave@appspot.com – Sometimes Waves can be born out of something you said on twitter and would like to carry on the discussion in Google Wave, so this bot will help you display your twitter feed in a wave.
wikifier@appspot.com – Adding more value to your wave communications by adding a Wikipedia reference using this bot.
wavevotely@appspot.com – With a tiny gadget, votely allows you to vote public waves up/down; enabling high-quality content to float up.
Fun - Google Wave Bots
emoticonbot@appspot.com - Turns smiley faces usually entered into text waves as ascii characters into images. It’s a feature found in several chat applications that has been made to fit into the Google Wave environment.
elizarobot@appspot.com – Remember the cute chat bots available on certain chat rooms that used to make news all the time, Elizarobot will to you when there isn’t anybody hanging around in the wave session.
flippy-wave@appspot.com - Flips text upside down in a wave discussion. Should come in handy when you want to bug somebody in a wave discussion.
wavehangman@appspot.com – difficult to guess what this bot would do? Play hangman on wave!
wave-skimmy@appspot.com – If normal emoticons are not really your style, add Emoticony for animated faces
piratify@appspot.com – Aargh! If you are a fan of the pirate clan, then this fun robot will convert your wave discussions into pirate-speak
rickrolley@appspot.com – Rick Roll a wave
cartoonybot@appspot.com – Replaces the text of every submitted blip with a cartoon balloon that contains the text instead. Colors the balloons based on username.
Scientific - Google Wave Bots
converty-bot@appspot.com – Adding this bot will help users do in place unit conversions for simple units, which can be very handy in a scientific or a technical document.
calcbot@appspot.com – This handy bot will allow users to perform quick calculations for simple mathematical expressions.
fnordlinks@appspot.com – While writing research papers, authors need to include references to other published research literature and this data is usually obtained from the Pubmed database of research literature. This bot replaces “PMID” with article information from PubMed, reduces the pain of typing in all the publication details.
watexy@appspot.com – Use LaTeX mathematical language in your Waves. This should be a handy tool for scientists and researchers who use the latex format to compose their research publications and other documents.
Other useful Google Wave Bots
There are a couple of Google Wave robots that will do translations of wave contents, like
shiny-sky@appspot.com – Gives the weather for a city.
stocky-wave@appspot.com – Say you have a wave with some stocks mentioned, this robot detects stock symbols from the wave and updates it with the live stock price. A great advantage if you’re preparing reports and other financial documents.
amazon-withwaves-com@appspot.com - The Amazon bot can detect products mentioned in a wave conversation and other keywords to pull up relevant product links and reviews for the wave participants.
The Google Wave Robots mentioned here are just the most useful bots that I’ve tried, but there will always be a number of new and more fabulous bots that can perform much more in the future.
