From The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave
Robots, or bots for short, are Wave extensions that look like wave participants and automatically update waves in useful ways.
The previous chapter covered how to add special chunks of interactive content to your waves in the form of Wave Gadgets. This chapter covers the other flavor of Wave extensions: Bots. Bots look like Wave users, but they're programmed to edit and update the contents of waves. Wave bots are like instant messenger bots—but with more possibilities, given Wave's collaboration capabilities.
What's a Bot?
A bot looks like any other Wave participant or contact. It has a Wave ID in the form of bot@example.com, and you can add a bot to your Contacts list just like you would any Wave user. The only difference between a bot and a human Wave user is that the bot is programmed to automatically perform some function within a wave. A bot is an automated wave participant that examines the contents of waves to which it is added, and updates or adds to them based on what it's programmed to do.
For example, there are bots programmed to automatically delete empty blips in a wave, or link all words that start with an at sign (@) (i.e., @twitter_username) to Twitter. Get those and the Wave IDs of more bots in the section titled "A Few Great Bots" below.
Add or Remove a Bot to or from Your Wave
As of writing, Wave bots are the only participants you can remove from a Wave. (If you click a participant's icon on the top of a wave, on the pop-up, the Remove button is enabled on bots only, not on human users.)
To use a bot, add its Wave ID to your Contacts list as you would any other contact. (See Chapter 3, Manage Your Wave Contacts, for more on how to add contacts in Wave.) Create a new wave, then add the bot to try it out.
A Few Great Bots
Every day, more bots become available for use in Wave. This section highlights a few of our favorites, their purpose, and because it's so early in Wave's life cycle and some things don't always work the way you'd expect, how well they're working.
To try out any of these bots, add its Wave ID (listed in parentheses after its name) to your Contacts list, and then add it to a new wave.
Wikify (wikifier@appspot.com)
The Wikify bot adds links to and definitions from Wikipedia to your waves for a given topic. When you add Wikify to a wave, it provides instructions on how to add a link to Wikipedia for a topic, or a definition of that topic. See Figure 8-1. to see how Wikify works.
Bot status: While Wikify's functionality is limited, it is stable and works as advertised.
CleanTXT (cleantxt@appspot.com)
The CleanTXT bot is an automated janitor for a wave, especially helpful on active waves with lots of participants, like public waves. When CleanTXT is participating in a Wave, it automatically deletes empty blips, reduces repetitive blank lines in a blip, automatically corrects common typos (such as a mistyped "teh" for "the"), and inserts missing spaces after commas and semi-colons.
The CleanTX bot also offers a hook into the Approver gadget, a thumbs-up/thumbs-down control that lets viewers rate blips on a wave. With CleanTXT participating on your wave, type !approver to add the Approver gadget to that blip; type !approver++ to have CleanTXT add the Approver gadget to every new blip submitted to the wave going forward.
CleanTXT is especially useful on public waves, which can get cluttered with accidental empty blips and typos quickly. See full instructions on how to use it and what it does at its homepage, http://cleantxt.appspot.com.
Bot status: Stable and working.
Polly the Pollster (polly-wave@appspot.com)
One of the most promising Wave bots available in the preview, Polly the Pollster lets you create multiple choice polls with custom questions and answers, and distribute them among any number of Wave contacts. As your contacts respond by selecting a radio button and clicking the Submit button, you can watch Polly's poll results, in the form of a pretty graph, update in real-time. See a Polly-generated poll and results graph in Figure 8-2.
Bot status: Polly mostly works, but it can be unstable and unreliable at times, especially in waves with lots of participants.
Usage note: Use Polly first thing on a new wave; the bot won't work if you add it to a wave already in progress.
Yelpful (yelpful@appspot.com)
The Yelpful bot offers an interactive, in-wave search interface to the business listings web site, Yelp.com. When you add Yelpful to a wave, it greets you and describes its usage with this message in a new blip:
Hello there! Usage: /yelp [location] [keyword] Example: /yelp sunnyvale ca mexican
Type a query, such as /yelp Brooklyn NY Sushi, and Yelpful responds with search results in a new blip.
Bot status: While Yelpful consistently responds to blips, its search results show up in HTML markup, which is not as readable as it should be.
TwitUsernames (twitusernames@appspot.com)
The TwitUsernames bot inspects the content of any wave it's participating in, and converts any word that starts with an @ sign to a user link to Twitter. For example, if you type @malcolmreynolds into a wave and add TwitUsernames, that word turns into a clickable link that goes to http://twitter.com/malcolmreynolds.
@twitter_usernames into Twitter links.Bot status: Stable and working consistently.
Usage note: TwitUsernames will only link @twitter_username's that appear in blips after the bot has been added. It will not link names in blips posted before it was added to the wave.
XMPP Lite (wave-xmpp@appspot.com)
The XMPP Lite bot sends you notifications of a wave's changes via XMPP (an instant messenger protocol). This means that if you have Google Talk running, if someone changes a wave you've subscribed to via the XMPP Lite bot, you will get those change notifications via chat.
To use the XMPP Lite bot, add it as a participant to the wave you want to get notifications about. The bot will add a new blip with a Subscribe and Unsubscribe button, as shown in Figure 8-4.
To use the XMPP Lite bot, add wave-xmpp@appspot.com to your Google Talk, Jabber, or AIM instant messenger client. Make sure you can receive messages from it (that is, that it is not blocked). Then, click on the Subscribe button in the blip the bot adds on the wave.
To unsubscribe from a wave, click on the Unsubscribe button. See more about the XMPP Lite bot's usage at http://wave-xmpp.appspot.com/public/xmpplite.htm.
Bot status: Stable and working, but very verbose. You will get every single change to the waves, so subscribe judiciously.
Madoqua Wave Bot (blog-bot@appspot.com)
Bloggers and other web publishers who want to try publishing the contents of their waves should try the Madoqua Wave Bot. When added to a wave, this bot provides customizable JavaScript code you can copy and paste into any web page to embed a wave, as shown in Figure 8-5.
You need to be comfortable with copying and pasting HTML and JavaScript widgets into your web page to use this bot successfully. Keep in mind that if you embed a wave only certain people can see in a web page, everyone else will see either a Wave login page, or a message that they don't have access to the wave. Even if you make the wave itself public and put it on a web page, it is still inaccessible to people who do not have a Wave ID—that is, didn't get into the Wave preview.
Bot status: Stable and working. The Madoqua Wave Bot is a clone of the Embeddy bot.
Emoticony (emoticonbot@appspot.com)
The Emoticony bot converts textual smiley faces into smiley face images. Add Emoticony to your wave, and in any blip (except for the first one), Emoticony automatically converts emoticons to images, as shown in Figure 8-6.
Bot status: Stable and working consistently.
Usage note: Emoticony will only turn textual emoticons to images that get saved in blips after it was added. Existing blips with textual emoticons will not become images after Emoticony is added (unless you edit and re-save them by clicking the Done button).
Inbeddable (inbeddable@appspot.com)
You already know you can drag and drop images into Wave, but to include images that are already online in a wave, the Inbeddable bot saves you the trouble of saving and re-uploading them. To embed an image that's already online, add the Inbeddable bot to your wave, and simply add the URL of the image to it. When you click Done (or press Shift+Enter), Inbeddable will turn the link image into the image itself, as shown in Figure 8-7.
Bot status: Stable and working consistently.
Usage note: Inbeddable only works on image links that are added to blips after it has been added. If an image link already exists in a blip and Inbeddable gets added to a wave, it will remain a link. Edit the blip and click the Done button (or press Shift+Enter) for Inbeddable to embed the image.
Easy Public (easypublic@appspot.com)
In Chapter 5 you learned how to make a wave public using the public@a.gwave.com contact—but you also learned that it doesn't stick around in your Wave Contacts list from session to session. The Easy Public bot makes waves public without public@a.gwave.com's disappearing act. Add it to any wave to give everyone on the Wave server access to your wave. What Easy Public does is add the public@a.gwave.com contact to your wave for you.
Bot status: Stable and working.
Usage note: Keep in mind that since Easy Public is a bot, you can remove it from a wave, but that will not make your wave un-public again. Removing the Easy Public bot from a wave will not remove the public@a.gwave.com participant which it added. There is no undo for making a wave public.
More (Fun) Bots
Several Wave bots show off what bots can do, but in more fun than useful ways. Eliza the Robot Shrink (elizarobot@appspot.com) is a programmed therapist who chats with you in Wave. The Swedish Chef bot (borkforceone@appspot.com) inserts "Bork bork bork!" into your waves. Flippy (flippy-wave@appspot.com) flips the text of your waves upside down—great for some April Fool's Day fun.
This chapter only features a small handful of available bots. See the (unaffiliated) Google Wave bots wiki[1] for a more comprehensive list of available bots.
References
- ↑ Google Wave Bots, GoogleWaveBots.info
