Over the past half hour - in a flurry of furious deleting, live-editing, dissappearing blips and random expletives - Google Wave met it's first fully-fledged (well, fledgling, really - more on that later) troll.

The attack seems to have ceased, but it wasn't easy to shut down. Wavers used a Google link (and Twitter) to alert the Wave team, but response was slow.

What is really interesting is... what happens now?

Up to this point the developers preview version of Google Wave has allowed open and live editing. Anyone can jump on any public wave, and edit or delete any part of it they like - including the Wave title and blips/comments from other wavers.

It's obvious this is not a feature that will follow GWave through to general release. Will the Wave team have to move more quickly to lock it down, now it's been so thoroughly abused?

Also, I'm picking (hoping) they'll put something in place quickly to report and/or temporarily disable active trolls; an enormous amount of good, collaborative information can be wiped out in seconds by a concerted attack.

So, who was it?

The troll was logged on as charanwilliams@googlewave.com. charanwilliams@gmail.com led to wavers locating a related website, run by a 12 year old boy from Chico, California. The website tells us his Uncle hosts his site and paid for the name registration. Won't he be proud?

Of course, someone else could well be using young 'Charans' identify for this unhappy stunt; I sincerely hope not.

Post-publishing edit: we've since found out you can report a user for trolling, spam or other anti-social naughtiness by clicking on their avatar on the Wave you are in and dragging it to the 'spam' button. Easy!

This posterous was posted from inside Googe Wave.