Google held the GTUG Campout, its first hackathon that focused on Google Wave. The programming teams were not restricted to Wave but also included several entries using Google’s Android OS.

Geogad was there and took part in a Wave project called “Trippy”, which is a Google Wave robot to help groups collaborate on trip planning. You can add it to any Google Wave by accessing trip-bot@appspot.com.

The weekend was a great way to get an intro to Google Wave and what it can do now and in the future. The overall impression from working on the Trippy robot is that Google Wave is rightly a developer only version for now. It is still missing several important pieces. Some of the biggest missing pieces are

1. Since there is no leader in a Wave, all participants are equal. This can be both good and bad.

2. No one has the ability to remove a participant after they have been added. This includes robot participants.

3. Wave cannot connect to external devices.

4. Wave gadgets and robots must reside on Google AppEngine, and the AppEngine still has some shortcomings. For example, in the Trippy robot, we planned and coded a version that accessed flight and hotel info from Kayak.com’s API. It worked locally but did not work on the AppEngine server because it had issues with accessing cookies properly. The Kayak API depends on cookies. As a result, the version of Trippy that was presented lacked this important feature.

The overall view of Google Wave is that there is a great deal of power under the hood, but it will need to be refined to make an impact with regular users.