I attended the Google Wave BOF (Birds of a Feather, A gathering of people with similar interests). It was a good time for folks with Google Wave accounts to show it off to folks who can't sign into it yet. It originally was going to be about 25 people but due to popular demand the location had to be moved, and it went up to about 40 people. Lots of folks were interested in hearing about Google Wave as a new collaborative platform.

id:a2c mentioned my 'debuggy' robot that I created to show events as they get fired by Google Wave. Below is me showing off debuggy at the Googleplex. I got a very tepid response from the folks at the hackathon. I seemed to get a better response from people at the BOF. I'll talk more about debuggy in a later post.

As it is, currently it was hard for most people to visualize how they would use the tool for daily work but everyone seemed interested in the possibilities and it was recieved warmly. Looking forward to future releases of Google Wave!

This year I attended Google IO and had so much fun that I think I'll have to break it up into several blog posts. Google IO is held in San Francisco and is the #1 Google event of the year. About 4000 or so developers attended the event which was held in the Moscone West Convention Center. In this post I'll kind of give the history of the events leading up to the event and some context.

One day in late January or so, Google announced that registration for this year's Google IO was open and there was a subsequent conversation on twitter that ensued which led to id:tmatsuo, id:a2c, id:voluntas, myself, and several others proclaiming they were going to attend this year's event.

I found out that the office of one of my old classmates, Bob Ippolito, is close to the event so I sort of jokingly invited myself and id:tmatsuo to stay at his office. You might know Bob as the co-founder and CTO of a company called MochiMedia, or as the author of numerous pieces of well used free software such as simplejson, MochiWeb, MochiKit, or PyObjC or as the coiner of the phrase JSONP (Note the date of the blog post). He has consistently gotten into things before they become big, including technologies such as json, erlang, Non-RDBM databases and often gives talks about them which essentially give you key insights into the future of web programming.

ded by offering to let me and id:tmatsuo stay at his apartment. However, when it came close to the event Bob realized that he was going to be at another conference for Flash developers in Boston, which meant that we would only have one day where we were both in San Francisco. Bummer! But he let us stay at his house even though he wasn't going to be there saving us a lot of money. He was very gracious.

Unfortunately, a few folks such as id:voluntas couldn't go to the event because of overreactions by their employers to the outbreak of swine flu but almost everyone that did go arrived in San Francisco on May 26th. I'll continue in a later blog post!!