On the eve of Halloween, between trick or treaters, my pocket buzzed and I noticed the words appear on the front of my Blackberry Flip (yes, I use that) – “Welcome to Google Wave”. My first reaction was “Sweet” and shut the door on a little panda bear and tiny butterfly. I raced to my netbook (which was running some solid Halloween tunes by yours truly – more on that in a future post) and after some furious typing logged into my account.
“Alright!” But no sooner did I log on that I realized I had no clue what to use it for. It looked super sweet, that’s for sure, but there was seemingly nothing to do. I created a Wave. Something simple. But I only had one contact showing up and despite being a super good guy, James wasn’t responding to my wave. It suddenly dawned on me that Google Wave might have huge potential, but at the moment it isn’t very useful. I was then free to continue handing out candy.
The next day (or possibly the next next day) I started looking at it again. Nope – still nothing. I re-watched the youtube clips in the introductory wave (one of several waves that are in new users’ inboxes by default) and still had no clue. I figured that Google Wave would be many times more useful if I just had more contacts. I then noticed that I had about 20 invites available (in the invite friends wave) and I began dishing them out through Twitter lightning speed. Unfortunately invites get approved more slowly than a wait in a Canadian H1N1 vaccine line (burn). A day later I still had only one additional contact listed and his name didn’t really ring a bell.
So that was my first impression of Google Wave. It looked cool, has obvious collaboration benefits over traditional email, but without the contacts, like email, it isn’t entirely useful. Or is it??
I noticed through Twitter that @modsuperstar had posted a Google Wave tip for searching public waves.
Entering “with:public bananas” in the search bar reveals all public waves about bananas. Similarly, “with:public extensions” reveals all waves (presumably) containing the word extensions. This immediately made Google Wave a little more useful by virtue of the fact that one can make a wave public and then people can contribute to it, reply to threads, start threads – very similar to IRC or BBS but with an obscene amount more editing possibilities. Plus the benefit of being able to see people edit the wave, real time – which is very cool.
I started a wave called “Google Wave Tips and Tricks”. I added a couple tips and then made the wave public. Making it public was an interesting task. To make a wave public, you must add public@a.gwave.com to your contact list. Then drag and drop that contact to the subscribed user list of the wave. You then see a message at the top of your wave saying that “This wave is public” (or something along those lines). Interesting choice phrase. But as soon as I did this, other users began subscribing to, commenting and editing the wave. Bots were also added to the wave (bots are scripts that automatically do stuff to a wave given certain criteria, for example format @name to a link to that person’s twitter profile).
Lifehacker noted in their Google Wave 101 article that one should take caution when making a wave public – doing so tends to cause a wave to be destroyed by newbies and people cluttering the wave with useless edits and junk. I can see that happening. Samples of these cluttered sorts of waves can be seen in a search for “with:public photography”. Click on a resulting wave and notice how your browser grinds to a halt as it tries to load the hundreds of photostream gadgets embedded in the wave by the countless number of subscribers/contributors.
Editing content in waves implies editing “blips”. A blip is like a small section in the wave that can be edited by one person at a time. There doesn’t seem to be a way to manage rights on blips or waves in general (as of now anyway – something I’m sure we’ll see in future iterations), which makes for the possibility of other users totally modifying something that you’ve previously written. Fortunately there is a way to navigate through the history of a wave. Google Wave has the ability to play back an entire wave from conception through to the present time. As you play the wave back, you get to see all the edits and “who done what”. Very fun to watch, actually.
As time progressed, various people added further tips:
- shift-enter can be used as a “done editing blip” shortcut (clicking outside of the blip also accomplished the same).
- how to stop getting notified about waves you’ve subscribed to
- that at the moment you can’t unsubscribe yourself (or someone) from a wave
- I questioned if Google Chrome ran Google Wave faster and immediately got answers (that yes indeed, the latest Chrome beta does – which I later verififed).
It was all kind of uncanny how quickly people began subscribing and adding content to the wave. I presume this was largely because Google Wave is relatively new and a public tips and tricks wave would be useful as the majority of users are newbies.
And it was watching the real-time collaborative effort of this wave that made me get all “neat-o”. Google Wave removes the constraints imposed by email – sending messages back and forth to edit something has been effectively canned, in favour of allowing individuals edit documents at the same time, real time. Theoretically, the speed at which a document could go from nothing to something is increased with real-time collaboration.
Now it’s not all bubblegum and chopsticks though. The base is all there, but Google Wave is still a work in progress. Some of the things that I’m looking forward to seeing include
- Rights and accessability management within waves – being able to identify who has the right to do what within a wave
- Read-only public waves. Currently a public wave is Read-Write by default, with no ability to change it
- User settings. There aren’t any right now. There should be a billion (or at least 5).
- Email notifications of wave updates. Right now if someone updates a wave which you are a part of, you have no idea until you login
But as the coming weeks and months go by, Google Wave will sign-up more users and make significant bug fixes and new features will be released. I’m looking forward to it. The possibilities with Google Wave when it comes to sharing info and working collaboratively are really interesting (I was initially thinking provocative, but then thought it was a possibly misleading). In the meantime, I’m going to continue to dig around the wave world. I’ve started a new website, gwavetips.net where I plan on posting regular Google Wave related updates.
