I feel like you already have to know what with:public is before reading this. I got 1.5 paragraphs in and stopped since I had no idea what was going on.
Well then I owe you a better explanation. If you haven't used Google Wave before I should first state that there is a search box in the center window. Simply by typing in with:public it searches all public waves and displays them. Then you can scan through waves of interest and join in where you like.
Additionally you can add extra qualifiers like with:public HackerNews and get waves like the HackerNews wave.
Nothing Earth shattering yet, but there is definitely some potential for people connecting which is always fun (at least for me) as well as building tools (robots) for automagic wave processing.
While they do resemble other forums, the drag and drop connections, and potential utility addins, as well as lightning fast search are drop dead sexy.
I can't normally think up a new tool for a forum I hang out on, and have them host it.
It's a distributal protocol. We can host our own servers which may require search like status propagation. I wrote it up not too long ago, but messages like "hey have you seen this string?" would aid decentralized search.
I get the impression that public waves were a quick hack that Google created to give new users someone to interact with while the network is new & small. (If you just got onboard, it's likely that you only have one friend, and that could get boring very quickly. Furthermore, enabling mass public interaction would give theme some stress situations to test how their infrastructure scales, and how their GWT client scales in the browser.) The strange fake contact that one has to add as a wave participant is one indicator. Another is the fact that with:public is undocumented.
Once the service is completely open, it's unlikely that this hack will be needed any longer. I wouldn't be surprised to see the public@a.gwave.com user retired after a while, anyway.
I have to say this is pretty awesome. I just created a public wave with a question in regards to the Reuters Newswires pricing structure, and the first people already replied.
I found it akin to having 100 IRC chatrooms open at one time. It was a bit too overwhelming in that new conversations kept being found/updated/changed.
I just got my invitation today- there is no way with:public will be usable once anyone can join. I can't even keep up as it is. Maybe it needs a pause button.
I believe the data pipeline will be quite valuable, and strong filters (Google can search like a bandit) will help you find information relevant to your interests.
