Wave and Open Source

Rasmussen said this text editor is the core of the Wave in-browser client, which was by far the hardest piece to write.

"It's wrapped in a very simple Web client that speaks the beginning of a client-server protocol. Eventually, this protocol will evolve into something that will let developers build full-fledged Web clients that can sit on top of any wave service that speaks its protocol, which of course will include Wave itself."

The Wave team said it also improved the Google Wave APIs. In particular, the Robots API v2 includes an "active" component and robots are no longer tied to Google's App Engine.

Wave robots are automated participants on a wave that can interact with waves just like human users. That is, robots may read the contents of a wave in which it participates, modify the wave's contents, add or remove participants, and create new blips and new waves.

In the past, robots had to live on Google App Engine, but Rasmussen said Google has removed that restrictions, satisfying a top request of Wave developers.

The Wave team has spent the last year rolling out Wave in stages. The team also open sourced various components of Wave and put up case studies on the XMPP and HTML5-based platform.

Wave was also criticized for not affording users enough control over their user experience. The Wave team added several management features to cut down on the noise. These include e-mail notifications and the ability to follow and un-follow Waves and jettison Wave participants.

Going forward, Rasmussen said his team will ad even more management features, as well as speed and usability features. He declined to provide specifics.