John Roa » The Blog

I am pretty sure this qualifies as irony … a direct marketing publication that doesn’t allow you to unsubscribe?

Scroll to bottom …

Click unsubscribe link …

Fail. The next day:

I am not sure if this is a problem on DM’s side or their email provider, but come on!

Robots

(To use robots, add them as a contact, then add the robot-contact to a wave)

Chatbots

• Eliza – ogenex@appspot.com – An implementation of the Eliza chatbot borrowed from the NLTK.
• Elize – elizarobot@appspot.com – Is one of the first robots that was created by non Googler and is very useful if you are feeling alone in your Google Wave client.
• Rude chatbot – notatory@appspot.com – An obnoxious chatbot borrowed from the Natural Language Processing Toolkit.
• TooAngel Wave – In Progress – tooangel-wave@appspot.com – A self learning robot, that will respond to a reply in a more humanoid way

Conversion

• BotURL – boturl@appspot.com – A URL Linker that replaces full URLs with hyperlinks.
• Calcbot – calcbot@appspot.com – This bot will do in place calculations for simple mathematical expressions and allow you to use user defined variables.
• Cartoony – 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.
• Dice Bot – dice-bot@appspot.com – Dice-rolling bot. Dice Bot will replace XdY (X is the number of dice; Y is the number of sides) with the results of those rolls.
• Flippy – flippy-wave@appspot.com – Turns text upside-down.
• Fnordlinky – fnordlinks@appspot.com – Replaces “PMID <number>” with article information from PubMed.
• Hearty Emobot – hearty-emobot@appspot.com – Replaces ASCII art with wingding characters.
• i-cron – i-cron@appspot.com – Evaluates Python expressions. Looks at blips in event, searches for CALC() macros and executes Python code using exec().
• Insulty – megabytemb123@appspot.com – Information Needed
• IPA Bot – ipa-bot@appspot.com – Changes normal letters into special characters used for phonetics.
• Piratify – piratify@appspot.com – Turns whatever you type into “Pirate Speak” .. Arrrr.
• Plotzie – plotzie@appspot.com – Plots sparklines from your data.
• Shortee – Wish – Change “c u l8r” to “see you later” etc.
• Swedish Chef – borkforceone@appspot.com – Changes english into Swedish-Chef Speak. Bork! Bork!
• Syntaxy – kasyntaxy@appspot.com – Syntaxy does blip-by-blip syntax highlighting for a variety of languages including Python, Java, C, C++, html, css and javascript.
• Watexy – watexy@appspot.com – Use LaTeX mathematical language in your Waves!
• Wikify – wikifier@appspot.com – Replaces specific marked up text with a link to Wikipedia or a description relevant to the marked text.

Games

• Hangman – wavehangman@appspot.com – Play Hangman.
• Roshambo – roshambowave@appspot.com – Play Roshambo (Rock / Paper / Scissors).
• Speedy – Wish – Track the words per minute of all participants, competitive typing!

Groups

• Groupy – groupy-robot@appspot.com – Robot to manage groups.
• Groupy – groupy-the-bot@appspot.com – Robot to manage groups.

Integration

• drop.io – mikeswaverobot@appspot.com – Creates a drop and puts the info into the wave whenever the robot is added as a participant.
• OpenAustrailia - In Progress – A robot to allow interaction with the OpenAustralia web site.
• PlonieBot – In Progress – ploniebot@appspot.com – Brings wave document editing capabilities to the Plone CMS
• Poppy - In Progress – poppywave@appspot.com – Helps bridge Google Wave conversations to email users outside the Wave.
• Rssybot – rssybot@appspot.com – Turn google wave into an RSS reader!
• Starify – starifybot@appspot.com – Lets you star waves, in sort of bookmarking style.
• Tweety the Twitbot – tweety-wave@appspot.com – You can access your Twitter account.
• Twiliobot – twiliobot@appspot.com – Transforms phone numbers into click-to-call links. If user clicks a link, a call is placed to his phone and to the number in the link. The call can be transcribed and inserted into the wave as text with a link to the audio.
• Wave-Email – In Progress – wave-email@appspot.com – Provide an extension to Google Wave which will allow the integration of both sending and receiving emails.
• Wave Live Messenger – wavelivemessenger@appspot.com – Allows you to chat to your windows live messenger contacts from inside a wave.

Language

• PhilBot – Wish – A suggested solution to the problem of waves with languages you can’t read.
• Rosy Etta – rosy@wavesandbox.com – Translator (40 Languages).

Polling

• Polly the Pollster - polly-wave@appspot.com – Poll Bot.

Search / Aggregation

• Dr Maps – dr-maps@appspot.com – Updates a wave by inserting a map associated to an address.
• Dr Weather – shiny-sky@appspot.com – Gives the weather for a City
• Embedded Search Results – wave-sandbox@appspot.com – Web and Image searches inline.
• FML Blipper – fmlblipper@appspot.com – displays random FML story from www.fmylife.com
• Grauniady – grauniady@appspot.com – Searches the latest items from The Guardian for a given phrase.
• Stocky – stocky-wave@appspot.com – Detects stock symbols from a wave and updates it with the live stock price.
• Wavethingy – wavethingy@appspot.com – Searches Amazon for DVDs and books, and gives the author a cut of any purchases made off the links.
• Yelpy – yelpful@appspot.com - Searches Yelp with a user defined location and category.

Utilities

• AmazonBot – amazon-withwaves-com@appspot.com – Enables social product research and shopping on Amazon.com. Wave participants can share products & reviews with contacts in real-time thanks to automatic queries by the AmazonBot against conversation keywords. The AmazonBot gadget can detect products and return inline product links or a custom full product browser.
• Bloggy – blog-wave@appspot.com – Information Needed
• Bit.ly Bot – bitly-bot@appspot.com – Shortens the url using bitly.
• Botty – Wish - Will automatically add a set of useful bots to a wave according to a collection of bots (so they don’t have to individually be added when you use them all the time.
• CountColon – countcolon@appspot.com – Adds text statistics to your blips (words, lines, etc.)
• Companion Sphere – companionsphere@appspot.com – Collection of geek utils, first working verb is “lookup” for wikipedia/wiktionary one-line descriptions.
• Databot – Wish – Will start as soon as the GData interface is published.
• Emoticony – emoticonbot@appspot.com – Replaces text representations of emoticons with the relevant image.
• JBREAKOUT BOT ADDED – jbreakout@appspot.com – Debug utility that reports event triggers.
• Maison – maison@appspot.com – Makes blips public at http://maison.appspot.com.
• Multi – multi-wave@appspot.com – A quote collector. Reply a blip you want to quote with ‘quote this’ and randomly display a quote with ‘quote <wave@account.com>’. The bot is still being under development but you can try playing with it.
• Natural Language Processing – knowledge-books@appspot.com – Adds blips with NLP analysis.
• Nokar – lab2market@appspot.com – Has many features such as translations, image insertion, insert last tweets etc.
• Posterous-robot – posterous-robot@appspot.com – A robot for posterous.com user to post blog in Google Wave. Here is how to write a blog using Google Wave Robot for Posterous.
• Publisher – wave-publisher@appspot.com – Information Needed
• Skimmy – wave-skimmy@appspot.com – Converts text emoticons, from : ) to img. Has a bookmarklet which creates a popup menu to insert emoticons for which the code is unknown.
• Smiley – smiley-bot@appspot.com – Changes the smiley symbols to smiley images.
• Smiley - In Progress – smiley-robot@appspot.com - Changes the smiley symbols to smiley images.
• Style Chart Robot – stylechart@appspot.com – Inserts a chart into a wave

Wave Management

• Bouncy – bouncy-wave@appspot.com – Allows you to remove robots from a wave. Doesn’t seem to work on real people though, and laughs if you try to ask it to kick itself out. To get it to kick a bot out, type “bounce:name@domain.com”
• Linear – Wish – Enforce all replies to be to the main wave. If a user replies to a reply, remove it and place it as a reply to the main wavelet.
• Read Onlie – readonliebot@appspot.com – Records the original wave content. Whenever it’s edited, the content is replaced with the original. Simple as that.
• Seekdroid – seekdroid@appspot.com – You can list Robots, add them and find them out, easy to use. In continuous development. Website with all the information seekdroid.appspot.com.
• Sweepy – sweepy-wave@appspot.com – Remove empty, whitespace-only blips.
• Taggy – taggy-wave@appspot.com – Recognize #hashtags and add them as tags to the wave.
• Tocgen – tocgen@appspot.com – Table of Contents auto-generated and updated based on the h1,h2,h3,h4 in a wave.
• Twitusernames – twitusernames@appspot.com – Replaces all Twitter @username with links to the Twitter accounts.

Gadgets

(To use gadgets, once editing a blip, just click on the green puzzle piece,  and enter the url into the bottom text box)

Utilities

• Ajax Animator Gadget – In Progress – http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/wave/manifest.xml – A fully integrated multi-user web based vector graphic animation authoring environment.
• AmazonBot Gadgett – http://amazon-withwaves-com.appspot.com/gadgets/AmazonProductList.xml - The AmazonBot gadget can detect products and return inline product links or a custom full product browser.
• Bidder – http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/gadgets/bidder.xml – Simple Auction.
• Checky – http://wave-gadgets.appspot.com/checky.xml – Basecamp-like checklists with drag-and-drop.
• Click me – http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/gadgets/hellowave.xml – Shows a button with a counter. Each time the button gets clicked, the counter is incremented by one. Shows off how the state interaction works.
• HTML- http://wave-ide.appspot.com/html.xml – Embed any HTML into a wave.
• <iframe> – http://wave-ide.appspot.com/iframe.xml – Embed any web page (as <iframe>) into a wave.
• iWave – http://gadget.wave.to/iWave/iWave.xml – Allows you to create a profile on wave to make wave just a little more personal. Uses facebook connect to retrieve your details if you sign in.
• Licensing – In Progress – http://wave-license.appspot.com/license_gadget.xml – Creative Commons RDF Embedding – Planning Stage.
• Maps – http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/101415471413908368316/mappy.xml -Embed Google Map.
• Napkin – http://my-wave-gadgets.appspot.com/wave/NapkinGadget.xml – Example of Flash/Flex Wave Gadget, similar to Whiteboard gadget above – source on Google Code.
• QuakeBot – In Progress – Server information on the Quake 3 protocol.
• Raffly – http://raffly.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/sandbox/raffly-xml1/raffly.xml – Insert this gadget to select a random participant from your wave to be the winner. The winner of what? Well that’s up to you
• Ratings – http://google-wave-resources.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/extensions/gadgets/ratings/ratings.xml – Lets participants rate and review a topic (movie, restaurant, etc) in a wave and shows a tally of the result.
• Slashdot Gadget – http://www.m1cr0sux0r.com/slashdot.xml – Loads latest Headlines from Slashdot.
• Troco – An experimental peer-to-peer currency –  http://troco.ourproject.org/gadget/org.ourproject.troco.client.TrocoWaveGadget.gadget.xml – Aims to provide a decentralized complementary community currency system, that is, a peer-to-peer currency system. Also you can see it as an IOU or promissory note based system. More info click here.
• Vector Editor – http://jsvectoreditor.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/wave/vectoreditor.xml – A cross platform collaborative real time vector graphics editor.
• Whiteboard gadget – http://vps.michaelrose.id.au/canvas.xml – Draw on a virtual whiteboard.
• Who is Coming? – http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/gadgets/areyouin/gadget.xml -Show a list of all people that have said whether they will come or not.

Games

• Backgammon – Wish – Remove all of one’s own checkers from the board before one’s opponent can do the same. [Wikipedia]
• Battleship – Wish – Displays different board based on user.
• Boxes – In Progress – Connect lines to make boxes and win.
• Cards – http://wave-cards.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cards.xml – Play card games.
• Chess – http://gerculanum.appspot.com/gadgets/com.example.chessgadget.client.ChessGadget.gadget.xml – Play chess.
• Connect 4/Four-in-a-row – In Progress – sdunster@wavesandbox.com – http://www.sdunster.com/wave/four.xml – 2 users + observers, turn locking, just waiting to write win-detection code.
• Floodit – http://gadget.wave.to/floodit/game.xml – 2 player race to fill a board with colors.
• Magnetic Poetry – http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/107558585548952247431/fridge-11.xml – Re-arrange random words to form poetry.
• Match them colors! – In Progress – Match 3 / gem matching game.
• Othello – Wish – Play Reversi.
• Sudoku – http://blah.appspot.com/wave/sudoku/sudoku.xml – Play Sudoku.
• The Button – http://hyperthese.net/wave-gadgets/the-button.xml – A useless (I mean USELESS) game.

Hooks

• CVS integration – Wish – CVS history can be converted into a wave with playback.
• GIT integration – Wish - GIT history can be imported and played back (dffs).
• SVN integration – Wish - SVN History can be converted into a wave with playback.

YouTube is great. It has a multitude of fantastic uses. It can draw hundreds of thousands of new fans for musicians. It can make you famous – or infamous. It make you laugh. A lot. YouTube stands tall while so many others have fallen.I have recently realized another unique, and unexpected, role that YouTube plays in our culture: a smoking gun. There have been more and more examples lately of YouTube being the ammunition for justice – something that simply couldn’t have happened a decade ago. A few recently:

1. Feline Abuse

About 8 days ago, there was a horrible video posted on YouTube of a cat being abused by two young men hidden by dark masks. I first caught mention of the video on Digg early Sunday morning. It goes without saying – the video was absolutely awful. Internet vigilantes from around the world – united by a common anger – were doing detective work that would make Sherlock proud. Within hours, with the help of the infamous hacker group known as Anonymous, we knew everything about our abusers – full name, address, age, home phone, cell phone, email address, parents’ names, parent’s work information, etc. Not more than a day later, after being picked up by news sources from the abuser’s home town to Russia, we got word that the cat has been rescued and the boys had been arrested by local police.

2. New York Policeman Abuses Cyclist

Patrick Pogan, a 23-year old rookie police officer, was caught on camera literally bodychecking a cyclist off his bike in an unreal act of violence. At first, the police officer told administrators that the cyclist was “obstructing government administration and resisting arrest”. A decade ago – it would have been the officer’s word against the victim’s – and we all know how that ends up. Enter YouTube. Months later – it is reported that ex-officer Pogan has been fired from the force and faces up to 4 years in prison.

3. Huff Says, She Says

Huffington Post, the popular left-wing news aggregation portal, is often criticized for .. well .. just about anything a news organization can be critisized for: agenda, bias, hate speech, stealing material, etc. However, thanks to YouTube, they can add one more to the list – doctoring video. I’m as anti-Fox News as the next guy, but the detective work done over at johnny dollar shows just how far Huffington will go to vilify Fox. In short, multiple audio/video clips were spliced together to put some racist/damning words in the mouth of John Gibson - that were never actually said. Huffington publicly apologized and said the video had come from another online source. This is probably the first and only time in my life I will defend anything concerning Fox, but journalistic integrity is something even they deserve. 

It is amazing to think that chances are none of the aforementioned events would have been rectified and had justice served had it not been for groups of determined internet users and tools like YouTube.