Yesterday i went over to the Google offices in downtown Munich for the special Wave event. Wave is interesting in many ways and after watching the Keynote live held by Stephanie Hannon, Lars and Jens Rasmussen during the second day of this years Google I/O in my second home town of San Francisco i was not the only one who was electrified. The guys around me cheered and applauded more and more during the keynote. This kind of thing happens not too often.

Anyways, Stephanie and Lars were in Munich and talked about what happened with Wave in the meantime. Stephanie promised to keep or even increase the pace of allowing new Wave members in with additional invites. Lars explained then some upcoming improvements. Some of them as a result of the success of the public waves (which they indended to shut down but they learned that this would be a bad idea). Sending waves to another person will be possible only if the recipient opts that person in or has it in the contacts. This is to reduce spam. The reject statisticts would also be used to automatically mark an account as a spammer which also would reduce the spam factor.

Lars kept on talking about the potential of Robots: “We should finally make them useful” he responded in his typical kind of humour. The current robot examples are already quite interesting but he wanted to make clar that this technology has a way higher potential. Asked about the business case of wave he explained some ideas like selling extensions and robots in a new appstore, to provide access to high res pictures instead of the compressed pictures currently stored  and of cause also to integrate Google ads: “Currently our UI does not leave any space for ads or anything else” he said too, but the UI could be changed.

Regarding the burning questions of when Wave will be completely (besides the closed source Google extensions) open sourced Lars said: “I hate to be on stage there (at next years Google I/O) not keeping my promise”. Lars explained that there are still a lot of hurdles to take. One major problem is the currently very tight connection to Google’s internal services – something which is unlikey to be open sourced.

Wieland Holfelder explained the Privacy Dashboard project which is done in Munich. Dashboard helps the user to define which kind of information Google knows and tracks about any user. The overall goal is to add transparency to this very delicate subject of privacy. Step by step all Google services should be included in the Dashboard. He also explained the goal to allow any user to export the stored data (contacts etc.) to be able to change the service provider.

Brian Rakowski then explained the Chrome and ChromeOS activities. HJe admitted that the Chrome team did a “terrible job” of marketing the browser and its features so far. The bad press in Germany especially did not help either and he stated that Chrome usage is significantly lower in Germany: “We try to understand and to learn what went wrong”.  Brian explained how the Chrome team tried to carefully provide services like “safe browsing” without breaching privacy. He admitted that the technology has not been explained good enough to be understood.

The OSX version of the chrome browser should be in beta this year (his words felt like around christmas).

Brian then explained and ChromeOS. No technical news here but he also promised that there will be the first open source package (pre-beta) out end of this year. This is good news. According to Brian the first product ready ChromeOS solution can be expected mid of next year. He got asked about Android vs. ChromeOS and his response: “ChromeOS comes from the desktop stripping all unneeded applications and providing everything through the browser interface. Android comes from the mobile device. Both meet in the netbook world. We think that both make sense there.”

The GTUG Munich event has been very interesting and i urge everyone in the area and interested to learn more about mighty Google to show up there once in a while to get a fresh update. Lots of thanks to Google to bring in the guys able to talk fist hand and Nils Hitze for organizing the event.