Yesterday, I posted a quick reply to a post on the google wave developer blog about creating a form based workflow system for google wave.  I was quite busy at the time and i think in my haste I may have been a bit brusque.    By way of making amends, here is how I would set up such a system. A forms workflow engine needs a number of components in order to operate correctly.

Google just posted on their Wave Developer Blog that their "wishlist" would have on it a way to process document workflow using google wave.  This reminds me of apost I wrote a while back on what google wave could be used for.  I did a proof of concept, but taking the concept to production would take too much effort for one guy in his spare time.  Probably the biggest barrier is integrating with HR systems.

About 3 months ago, I wrote a google wave gadget, which allows users to collaboratively work on a google wave gadget within google wave.  I've gotten a bit of publicity out of it and its all been great.   Sadly, tonight, the wave that I created to document my gadget has crapped itself, collapsing under the publicity of its own popularity, with more than 200 blips and 500 participants.   The main blip in the wave now has no content whatsoever, and I can't view its history to repair its view.

The local Melbourne chapter of GTUG is hosting a meeting around developing extensions for Google Wave this wednesday at RMIT.  The big presenter there will be Pamela Fox, Google's developer relations person, but I've been asked to give a quick run down at the end on my experiences developing a mind map gadget.  If I get time, I might also theorise about how wave could be used to provide ad-hoc communications focused tools inside business.

I've just updated my Google Wave Mind Map gadget to a new version.  New features include: It renders graphically now, so things are a little prettierIt won't work on Firefox versions earlier than 3.0.  If you are running an earlier version I strongly suggest that you upgradeThere is now the ability to edit properties, accessable via the properties menu button.There is a context menu that can be used to access the menu, accessible via the Right Mouse button.

A lot of people are saying that using Google Wave to discuss conferences live is the new hotness. Given that there will be a special google wave announcement at tomorrow's Enterprise Futures Forum in Melbourne, I'm willing to guess there will be waves for the conference. In anticipation, I have created a wave for the tech discussion session I am running on local implications for cloud computing. There's not much there at the moment.

The other day, I released a mind mapping gadget for google wave, and its proven to be quite popular. Popular for something I knocked together quickly anyway. There's an active wave discussing features, which also serves as the main description of the gadget. Its getting a bit long now, and I'm aware that there is a limit to how big waves can get before they start to slow down. It also gets to the point where I want to simplify things so that a new reader coming upon the wave doesn't get confused by the threads of conversation there.

As you can probably tell by my recent posts, I’ve been mucking about with Google Wave for the last week or so. It shows a lot of promise, but we still need to work out the best way to use it. Some colleagues and I were discussing some practice development the other day. One of them said that they had created a mind map on mind42.com and had shared it with us so that we could map out some ideas.

I've been spending some time recently thinking about Google Wave, and how it can be useful as a method of communicating and working with multiple participants at the same time, which is what Wave is for, but with a robot as one of those participants.  Wave provides an easy way to incorporate a computer participant in a conversation with people, getting it to receive all updates to the wave and provide its own input.

I’ve been thinking over the last few days about what Google Wave could be used for. Obviously it can be used as a document collaboration and review platform. It can also be used as a multi-user chat program, although there are probably other existing programs that are just as good for managing that. Some people have claimed that it isn’t anything revolutionary. In and of itself, this is true, as it just takes concepts already available in email, instant messaging and collaborative documents and puts them together.