Wow, what a day yesterday was!

Google went all-out at their Google IO event, and went and changed all kinds of things.

Google Wave announcements, a new codec for the web supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera, and all kinds of other fancy bits and pieces.

On top of this, Twitter for iPhone made it into the app store, so I can load that up and have a bit of a play with that too.

Look out for posts over the next few days on all of these – there’s still Day 2 of Google IO to come, where I’m probably going to get extremely excited about Android announcements!

Recently I was asked to take part in a new venture of the This Is Me project at the University of Reading. Following the recent extended beta of Google Wave, it was thought that it would be a really good idea to collaboratively work on some of the project inside Wave itself.

I thought it would be a great way to further investigate the possible applications of Google Wave. Cynics of the application have cited that there seems no real uses for it at the moment, and that while Google have created a very cool tool, no-one seems to think they can use it for anything that’s not covered by software that already exists.

Here’s why I think they’re wrong, and why Google Wave has so much potential.

Last week when I had a bit of a look at Google Wave, a lot of people mentioned how it didn’t really seem like a complete product, something that was a bit of a let-down.

I’ve been having a bit of a think, and I think I can see where this one’s going.

I read a comment on a blog earlier today by Robert Scoble, and he had it exactly right when he said FriendFeed had it nearly right before they got absorbed by Facebook. I think the future is going to look a lot more like FriendFeed than anyone dares to think. Here’s why:

Google Wave was down when I got into the office today and I was initially startled to realise that their maintenance redirect was invalid.

It tries to redirect you to http//wave.google.com/maintenance/ – can you spot the missing bit? So Firefox decided to prepend the properly formatted http://, and of course this lead to a pretty nasty error as its an invalid URL.

When I did finally get to the landing page, I found a rather curious holding page that someone had clearly got far too carried away with in their 20% time…

Yep, there we go, I said it. There is nothing that I hate more than AJAX.

Not very “Web 2.0″ of me, is it? Well, not exactly.

That’s because this rant isn’t about asynchronous Javascript and XML. This is about people who use AJAX interchangeably with “Javascript”, who think that AJAX means their website looks good, and who think that AJAX should be used for every single thing on their site.