I personally think that google wave is going to be the coolest thing ever, and Ive been thinking about it a little bit, and Ive come up with a couple ideas, and I feel like I will eventually be thinking up more, about how google wave could be extended to make it even better than it already is.
first, implementing sms alerts for everybody in a wave, since Ive started consolidating my contact lists I feel like when you get to some consensus in a wave it makes sense to be able to alert everybody via the easiest method. Obviously, the future of the wave is such that updates will be displaying on their mobile device via the internet, but for the time being, it makes sense to have a push system, such that some section of the wave could be highlighted and sent out as a text to all the people currently involved in the wave. allowing some way to unsubscribe from this makes sense, but implementation details clearly arent ironed out yet. so, probably a list that you need to join within a wave, possibly just a gadget. also need to have some way to prevent spamming in case somebody wants to just be a jerk. time limit between updates, or something, so that people could go into the wave if they are bothered by a couple in a row,
second. making a group of waves a programming project. start a new account, and share waves that are associated as classes with that way. this account, via some formatting method of comments at the top of any given wave, could act as the central repository for a code base. given a waves ability to roll back, it would allow for a robust method of testing and checking code in, would allow for simultaneous collaboration in code and would allow for rapid development. Things to consider involve security, if this account is compiling code that is entered in a wave, all collaborators of any class need to be trusted. but that is pretty much true with any coding project, so it just becomes a matter of having a priviledge system in place, who can grant access and who can revoke and such. Other things to consider are language support, how the waves are exported, what type of syntax to use for committing, how to roll back to a former stage, although a copy of the whole former stage and a paste over the whole wave, with a notification of who performed it and an update of the version number seems to be sufficient.
thidly, integrating waves. say I wanted to have a business wave, with public announcements, announcements for only executives, and things for all managers and above. could segment things, and then have a method of dropping a segment into a lower level. would be useful for a number of situations, could have different rules. could be allowed to move people between levels of access with different rules, x people in group a need to approve a person from group b before they are allowed access, or single person vetoes, anything is possible. who knows.
