Home of Rex Havoc, Space Adventurer and other assorted Geekeries.
Google Wave is dead. I don’t care. For a while I did care, and I had a site about Google Wave called First Waves. I’ve shut it down and incorporated the posts back into The Geekorium. This post is just in case 1 person still had me in their feed reader and wondered why they started getting posts about a Space Hero.
So there you go.
So I’m hanging out on Google+. I mean literally of course — the second1 new social network that Google has launched in the last couple of years has a “hangout” feature where you can chat with lots of friends simultaneously via video. I’ve never tried it, so I’m sitting here in the hopes that someone will join in with me. No one has come past yet, but I think that says more about Australian/American time difference and my own social ineptness than the popularity of the feature. I hear very good things about it.
This article isn’t about that feature specifically. This is about Google+ in general. The new social network that totally isn’t trying to out-social Facebook2. It seems quite a hit! But then so was Buzz initially. You remember Buzz? The social network built knee-deep into GMail that a lot of people tried, but no one really liked3. There was also Wave — but that never made sense to most people4. I mock, but only out of love. Google, despite their failures are not a company to give up on something once they have it in their sights, and understandably they want to get in on this “social” act.
What “social” means exactly is anyone’s guess, but in vague terms it means somehow putting all that information you generate when you browse the web and share the cool stuff you find with your friends to use. Sites like Facebook are all about giving you a central place to post videos and photos you like so other people can see how witty and clever you are for liking Transformers before they were ruined5 by Michael Bay. This sort of sharing has come a long way since the web was made. It used to be that you had to own your own website and manually copy/paste links and videos into your pages and hope to hell that people might find, and occasionally re-visit, your site. Then sites like Blogger and WordPress came along and made that somewhat easier, then Tumblr and Facebook — making those sorts of short and snappy link sharing posts easier and easier to do. Now you wave your mouse in the direction of the Facebook tab and it pulls out that it’s a Youtube video and picks out the title and description and even embeds the video, and you barely have to do anything. Well now Google is heading one step further. They aren’t there right now — Google+ is still a lot like Facebook on the surface — but deeper down the steps are there to become something massive.
Today at the Google I/O Conference (the same one that Google Wave was announced at last year) Lars Rasmussen gave a brief update on Google Wave. The biggest news is that Google Wave is now available for any one to sign up without an invitation. This makes it much more likely that large groups will just get started collaborating on Wave without having to coordinate Wave invitations for everyone. While the service was invite-only it had the appearance of being a “tech elite” product. As more people found uses for it in group situations (classrooms, meetings) the need to make it easy for the people that actually wanted to use the product to do so became obvious.
In a guest post on the Huffington Post, Lars explains:
For this reason, today we opened up Google Wave to everyone. You no longer need an invitation to use the service. Simply go to wave.google.com and sign right in. Likewise, if you administer a Google Apps domain, you can now easily enable Google Wave for all your users at no extra cost. Google Wave is now officially part of Google Labs, the same place my team launched Google Maps close to 5 years ago.If you tried Google Wave earlier and found it not quite ready for real use, we think you’ll find that a lot has changed, and now is a good time to give it another look.Lars Rasmussen in the Huffington Post
Did you catch that second part? That was the other half of the announcement: Google Wave is now live for all Apps for Your Domain accounts! If you are using Gmail or Google Calendar on your own domain name, you can now use Google Wave too, and it integrates fully with the normal Google Wave experience. Those of you who have been waiting for this since launch, or since Linkoping University announced it for their students, well wait no more!
It took about 3 hours from the announcement to being able to add Wave to my own domain account. Setup is a breeze. Click the “Add more services” link on your App Dashboard to install the Wave Preview. Then get Waving!
Don’t forget to Wave @ me and add [email protected] to your Wave contacts.
A few weeks ago, I noticed a new feature of Google Wave that allowed a user to easily send websites and content to a new wave to easily share with others. The feature (called “Wave This”) was not officially announced at the time, and I was asked politely not to say anything more at the time until the team could officially announce it.
In addition to this, the Wave This function has an official Chrome Extension. Install the extension, and you can send any page to Wave with a click!
Finally, you can also use an undocumented Wave This feature to add a Wave contact button to your sites. At the top of my page I’ve added a “Wave @ me!” button that starts a new wave with me as a participant so you can easily contact me in Google Wave. To add the button to your own site it’s as easy as filling your details in the code below:
<a href="https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=Contact+via+[Your-Site-Name]&r=[fill-in-your-@-wave-address-here]" title="Contact me in Google Wave" class="vt-p"><img src="[your-button-image]" alt="Wave at me!"></a>
The &r parameter for adding a recipient isn’t listed on the API page and support might be pulled or altered so use at your own risk. Additionally, be aware that the Wave This function currently defaults to the Google Wave Preview account only, so if you use a different client (a Google Wave for Domain Apps account for instance, or Novell Pulse) you’re out of luck for now.
So there you have it! A new API, an awesome function, and my modest widget. Have at it! Make some buttons!! Start spreading Wave!!!
Something that’s been bugging me about the Google Wave interface are the icons that show you three participants from each wave in your inbox (and other searches). The origins of the feature make sense — in email we’re used to seeing who an email is from right from our inbox. In one and two person waves it does kind of make sense, but when you have multiple participants the icons stop being useful and just become clutter. To me it adds nothing to my ability to identify a wave and just makes my inbox “noisy”. The icons in the wave make sense, but I’d like a more thought out approach to identifying waves. Something like:
Now this post wasn’t started just as a gripe against something I’d like to see changed — I’d like to hear what things you’d change about wave if you could. I’m not necessarily talking features we know might come (like the recently switched on “Remove” button). I mean interface and behaviour changes that don’t make sense to you, or made sense at first, but don’t now you’ve used it a bit. What are your specific gripes and revolutionary ideas that would make using Wave more of a delight for you?
The most long-awaited feature (besides the seemingly dead “Draft” button) has finally been imlemented by the Google Wave team. That’s right, Remove Participant is here! What this means if you’re not an addicted Wave user, is that wave authors now have total control over who comes and goes from their waves.
This is a big deal for Google Wave. The button has been there since the beginning, but grayed out and unusable. It’s taken some of the shine off Wave that until today you were unable to recall waves or remove people added accidentally.
It works in a pretty straight forward way. You decide someone should not be a participant any more and you click remove. The person who is removed sees a big red X on the wave in their inbox and opening the wave shows the last thing they were able to see before you removed them. If you remove them before they even open the wave, they won’t even know it existed!
Part of me balks at the idea of removing waves right out from under their noses if they haven’t opened them. It feels somewhat dishonest — but it’s actually just fixing a email shortcoming! I think we’ve gotten so used to the idea that once something is sent, it can’t be unsent that it feels a bit weird to actually be able to do it again. Keep in mind though that this probably isn’t foolproof. If for example someone’s waves become “unsynchronised” while you are removing them from the wave, they might still see it — leaving you thinking that you got to it in time.
Another big issue in the months since launch has been Wave abuse. Waves have been destroyed by malicious (and accidental) addition of bots, or overwhelming the wave with large amounts of spammy text. At the moment, the best way to deal with this has been to reduce the abuser’s participation to “Read-Only” and report them to the abuse team. This remains the best way to halt an ongoing attack, but now it’s also possible to clean up after an abuser by removing the sign they were ever there in the first place.
When I started First Waves I wanted to keep my readers up to date with Google Wave news and keep on top of changes and updates as they happen. However, looking around the net I soon found many sites that already do a great job of keeping up with Wave news, and I hate the idea of rehashing the same stuff my readers could get at any number of excellent sites. So instead I have started to concentrate on larger news and “future direction” stuff here at First Waves, and I hope my readers are OK with the focus.
But I realise that many people do want up-to-the minute Wave information, so I’m going to lay out the sites and people I follow, and if you’re a hardcore Wave nut, you might like to follow them too. These people all have my utmost respect and admiration for their writing and dedication to Wave. I’ve included these sites in a Google Reader bundle called Best Google Wave Sites. If you trust my judgement, you can use the bundle to subscribe to all twenty-two feeds in just a couple of clicks! If you’d like to know more about the sites though, read on!
I was visiting Pamela Fox’s personal website, and noticed she had a Wave This! button attached to her latest post. Interested in what it did, I clicked it and it opened a summary of that post in Wave ready to share with others! I can’t find mention of the feature anywhere, and I’m not sure if it’s permanent, but a specially formatted URL takes a title argument, a content argument and passes it to a special new wavethis function as shown:
https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=[insert title]&c=[insert content]
Using a bit of PHP in WordPress and a plugin called Samsarin PHP Widget (that allows php in a special widget) I created the Wave This! button over at the side. Feel free to use it!
The PHP I used was as follows:
<?php if ( is_single($post)) {
$excerpt = urlencode(get_the_excerpt());
$posttitle = urlencode(get_the_title());
?>
<a href="https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=<?php echo $posttitle ?>&c=%22<?php echo $excerpt; ?>%22"><img src="http://turbo.firstwaves.org/wavethis-button-dark.png" alt="Wave This!" /></a>
<?php } ?>
Simply install and activate the plug-in. Add the Samsarin widget to your sidebar and past the code in as you see it. It will only appear on post pages (not the front page).
I created a couple of button images you can feel free to use:
So that’s the new Wave This! button. Go ahead and give it a try. If you’re a developer I’d be interested in seeing other ways to implement this.
Google Wave is a product that’s trying to do something massive to the way we communicate online. Its stated goal is to be what email might look like if it were invented today. A number of other services are labeled as competitors to Google Wave, including the recently updated Google Docs (which is too new for me to comment on in this article), but I wanted to take a look at which of these services are real competition. Below are the services who show the most promise at becoming the next generation of online communication.
Microsoft Sharepoint is a suite of content management tools to maintain and collaborate on documents. While it was never sold as a replacement to email, it was held up as one of the products Google Wave was meant to compete against. But as Steve Gaitten of Bamboo Nation points out, Wave competes with Outlook, not Sharepoint.
It might be possible for Microsoft to transform Outlook in some significant way that expands it beyond email into some sort of super email client. It might even integrate it into Sharepoint a lot further. The truth is, email is Google Wave’s biggest competition. It might be outdated and rough, but it’s the most popular form of communication on the internet. If anything stands a chance at beating Wave, it’s the service that Wave is trying to beat. If email innovation can keep up with user demand, it might just remain the top dog for another 40 years. If Outlook can maintain the large slice of the pie it has, while innovating on top of email it could still be competing into the future.
This is exactly the kind of “competition” Google was hoping for when they built Wave. As I’ve said before, Wave’s only hope of replacing email is federation. Only by giving users the choice of Wave provider will users find one that works for them. Novell Pulse might even become a more loved Wave client, and I think that would actually make Google happy. Personally, I’m eagerly awaiting a Pulse preview account.
This tool was touted as a Google Wave competitor while in Beta (with the code name 12Sprints or Constellation).
The tool turns out to be a collaboration space for making decisions. It’s not a complete replacement for email, but I’m not sure that was ever their intention. Streamwork allows a team to collaborate and add gadgets to enhance the process.
“It was clear we needed to work together,” Meyer said. “We’re excited about what they’re doing, they’re excited about what we’re doing.” Users will be able to share content between the two platforms, he said.
David Meyer, reported by Computer World
It will be interesting to see what sort of integration they build into it.
Much like Streamwork, these tools are not marketed as email replacements, but were both touted as Google Wave competitors. What they do is allow users to collaborate on documents in real-time. If these sorts of services were better integrated into email (perhaps using GMail’s new oAuth tools) they might be more likely candidates. Otherwise they are really only competing with Google Docs and others of that kind.
Products such as ccBetty and the others mentioned enhance email. They exist to remove the holes in email by providing additional information, embedded media, faster searching, or simplified discussion. Some work on GMail, others on Outlook, others work outside any email service by CC-ing a special address onto each email you wish to turn into a discussion. The problem with all of these tools as competition for Wave is that the email protocol just doesn’t take these sorts of tools into consideration, so they’re limited by how many services the developers can write for. That is, each service might support Outlook or GMail, but not all the other smaller players in the marketplace. Where Google Wave has this model beat is by including extension support from day one, allowing developers to enhance Wave in whatever ways they can imagine. Any service that federates with Google Wave will also support these extensions, making it a truly open, extensible experience.
This collaboration tool gets its own special crossed out spot because it was one of the strongest, simplest competitors in the collaboration space, but was bought by Google! The developers have obviously since been put to work on Google Docs, as evidenced by the announcement of the recent update.
This one scares me a little. In some ways, Google Wave is the anti-Facebook. Where Wave is built on open technology, uses an open protocol and federates with other services, Facebook is a “walled garden” and keeps users inside their service. Both systems let developers make extensions and apps that use the platform, and Facebook seems to be slowly inching towards including some of the collaboration features that have been missing so far. Facebook has a huge user base, and could easily become some sort of defacto go-to communication platform for the masses. Currently though there are no obvious moves to open up the platform further, making it unlikely to catch on in business, where email still rules.
Currently, none of the services in their current form pose a threat to email — they’re too limited with their 140 character limits and lack of in-line collaboration. But Twitter (or a more open version of it at least) is the product I think has the most real chance of beating Google Wave at becoming the communication platform of the future.
A distributed network (integrated with Twitter of course) that updates in real-time, with an API could have many people needing their email less and less. Once you can get updates from your favourite companies and all your friends are on the service, why would you need it? Throw in an extension or two, enhanced private messaging, and you have a very compelling product that could steal users away from email. The platform is so new, no one really knows where it could go in the future, and I suspect it will give Google Wave and traditional email a run for their money. It could be Twitter, or Buzz, Status.Net or a new player we’ve never heard of, but the idea has the strongest traction of any I’ve seen.
So those are my thoughts about Google Wave’s true competition. Of course, a company could come out of the blue with a product so completely new and exciting it amasses a huge audience that completely abandons email. This is the least likely of all I think, as I’ve stated before I think Wave is our best chance at replacing email wholesale. Alternatively, email will be killed by slow changes to the next generation of social communication. The chances of it happening are dependant on the whims of companies who are trying to make a buck, not replace email so I’m not holding my breath. Email will be replaced by something federated, open, extensible and easy to use. I’ve taken my best shot at predicting what it could be.
What are your thoughts? Is Google Wave our best hope, or is there something even more obvious that could take email’s place?
Image by JEFFREY’S MURALS
I had my first taste of international communication today thanks to Google Wave. David Alviz runs an excellent Spanish Google Wave site called WAVEsfera. He keeps up with the latest bots and gadgets, and writes very well. A while ago it might have been a small problem that his site is entirely in Spanish. Translation has been around for a while on the web now, but it involved taking note of the site and plugging it into Babelfish or something similar. Now I have translation built right into Chrome. when I visit WAVEsfera, it asks if I want it automatically translated. Similarly, I’ve subscribed to the site in Google Reader, and it translates the site for me too! So far so good, no reason not to subscribe to international sites any more!
Then I got to thinking. I’m getting in touch with some of the people who have read First Waves, and realised that it’s the perfect chance to try Aunt-Rosie, one of the original bots released with Wave. So I fired up a wave and added WAVEsfera and the translation bot. I selected the destination language and started typing.
It was true magic.
My amazement at watching my words translated as I type is like that of a caveman witnessing fire. the experience is so novel and potentially life changing. Imagine a world where language is no longer a barrier for communicating with anyone. Think of the potential for learning!
I’m full of excitement for the world of tomorrow enabled by real-time communication and translation. We’re so close to realising the universal translator of Star Trek that I can almost taste it.
In a site note: Inspired by my discoveries, I’ve enabled instant translation to each of my posts. I know I’ve had visitors from Germany, Ireland, the USA, France, Spain, the Czech Republic and Turkey just today! If you want to read First Waves in your language, check out the “[Translate]” button beneath each post. If you’re an international reader, I’d love to hear from you! Please leave a comment, or wave me at [email protected] and don’t forget to add [email protected]!
Edited image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/ / CC BY 2.0