Robot Types
Even a few months into the developer preview of Google Wave it became evident that a broad range of robots will emerge as savvy developers tap into the Robots API. Despite the diversity of existing robots (and yet-to-be-developed robots, I’m sure), I think it’s valuable to review four general types of robots.[42]
Content Assist
As their name implies, content assist robots provide some type of assistance to participants as they add content to a wave. These types of robots usually modify content in a blip in order to improve or augment a conversation.
Both Emoticony and Complety are basic examples of content assist robots. Emoticony replaces text-based smiles in blips with smiley images to provide a nice visual touch for blips. Complety uses the Google Search API to replace successive question marks in blips with suggested words (e.g., “The capital of Kenya is ???”).
Data Synchronization
Data synchronization robots do not directly modify any content on a wave. Instead, these types of robots exchange information back and forth between a wave and other services.
Tweety, the robot that “tweets” blips based on participants blips and turns tweets into blips, is a good example of a data synchronization robot. Tweety isn’t necessarily modifying the content of blips or performing complex operations on the content of a blip. Rather, it is capturing and exchanging information that is relatively static and noncontextual.
Multiwave Applications
Robots that serve as multiwave applications ...