I have been so busy lately that I almost forgot to write about my lightning venture into writing a Google Wave robot: Trendy.
For those of you living under a rock in the last several months, Google Wave offers an API for the development of robot, which are... well, robots, which when added to waves, do automated tasks with its contents. There are robots for translating, do syntax highlighting on codde snippets and so on.
My idea for a robot was to create one which would allow for easy insertion of Google trends results into a conversation. Why? because everyone's favorite kind of online conversation is centered around what's hot and what's not... thus the need to quickly check the latests trends in mindshare (as proxied by search volume).
My initial approach was to somehow fetch raw data about trends from google and generate a small plot with the results (using google charts). But I stumbled into the fact that Google has yet to release an API for access to trend data. After a couple of days frustrated, which made me almost give up, I stumbled into a solution, which was both easier to code and faster on the server -- Robots use AppEngine for hosting, but for a robot, you must strive to keep latency as low as possible.
The solution involved embedding Google's own trend gadget, into the wave, replacing of the markup. Did I mention the markup? after fiddling with various possibilities, and decided on this markup: ~~topic1,topic2,topic3,topic4.
Whenever the robot finds such strings, it tries inserts a trends graph for those trends in the blip. make sure you dont forget the period at the end of the topic list, and add some text after the end of the markup, otherwise the robot gets confused... (I'll fix this bug at some point).
Enough talk, If you want to know how I did it, go read the source. If you're curious of how it works and have a wave account, add it to a wave and start playing: trendy-robot@appspot.com
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