Liaise indirectly shows what's coming with Google Wave
People are excited about Google Wave for several reasons. Some like the real time collaboration part of it, some like the federation part of it and some like the tools (gadgets and robots) part of it.
Google Wave based real time collaboration is quite advanced but might be little too advanced for it to catch up with the mass. For what little I have used, its seemed extremely confusing, uber-cool but confusing. I can only imagine with more users in the conversation the worse it is. Federation aspect of Google Wave really brings a lot of possibilities for mixing private, protected and public environments together. I am excited to see how corporates and others will take advantage of it. However, I am super excited to see what developers will cook with the tools mainly the robots. I developed a simple hello world robot and was getting ready ( Its another issue that I got busy with my daytime job and never did anything after that) to build a todo list app and possibly a small thymer style task/project management app .
The key thing with the robots is Wave allows regular Java/Python and hopefully in the near future other language developer to hookup with the conversations and write tools. Now that might not sound that big but think about Liaise , readwriteweb calls it 'possibly coolest email add-on ever' and I agree. Check the video for yourself, I haven't seen anything like that as an email client extension. Now Outlook and other email clients have been there forever and there have been plugins in that ecosystem but with Google Wave add-ons like Liaise will popup much much quicker as the Google Wave robot API is simple can be written in standard popular programming languages and gives real time access to the conversations. I hope that Liaise will build these add-ons for Gmail, thunderbird, Wordpress and Wave. Whether they developer for Wave or not, I see a lot of such cool automated tools coming to Google Wave.
