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Google Wave Gets Email Notifications

In Post on 2010-03-05 by Joshua Tagged: , , , ,

One of the prob­lems with Google Wave for the non-geek crowd has been how you know you have a new wave?

For ded­i­cated geeks, there are browser exten­sions, OS spe­cific soft­ware, iPhone Push noti­fi­ca­tions, and more.

But most of these don’t fig­ure in the non-geek arse­nal for man­ag­ing the wash of infor­ma­tion from the inter­net. And for reg­u­lar folk con­vinc­ing them to use Wave with­out these sorts of noti­fi­ca­tions will be hard sim­ply because they don’t want to bother check­ing for new waves as well as new emails.

Con­vinc­ing them may have just got­ten eas­ier how­ever with the release of inte­grated email noti­fi­ca­tions for your Wave inbox. In a post on the offi­cial Google Wave Blog, Ged Ellis explains how to turn on email noti­fi­ca­tions for new waves. Using the drop down list next to the inbox link (it’s hid­den until you hover over it) you can choose an email address to have noti­fi­ca­tions sent to. The tool even picked my Google Apps email even though it’s not my offi­cial Wave address because I’ve set it as pri­mary in my Google profile.

NotificationsMenu.png

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Google Wave Births “Active Robots”

In Link on 2010-03-03 by Joshua

An amigurumi robot

In my post yes­ter­day I noted the increased push by the Wave devel­op­ers to make it eas­ier for the wave com­mu­nity to build and deploy exten­sions. It turns out this flurry of activ­ity coin­cided with the immi­nent release of Ver­sion 2 of the Wave API, announced today.

The first new fea­ture is the:

Active API: In v2, robots can now push infor­ma­tion into waves (with­out hav­ing to wait to respond to a user action). This replaces the need for our dep­re­cated cron API, as now you can update a wave when the weather changes or the stock price falls below some thresh­old. You can learn more in the Active API docs.

Google Wave Devel­oper Blog Announce­ment.

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Submitty and Gadgitty — Two Bots to Help Wave Developers

In Post on 2010-03-02 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

Recently, the Wave Team have made a big push to pub­li­cise more bots and exten­sions. In a post to the Google Wave Help forum, Kylie announced that some users might start see­ing a new Exten­sions link in their nav­i­ga­tion panel. Then enter­pris­ing Wavers noted that any­one could get access to this Exten­sion infor­ma­tion with a search for [group:google-wave-extension-gallery@googlegroups.com].

Now Google have made it eas­ier than ever to sub­mit an exten­sion to the Wave Exten­sion review team using a sim­ple bot.

submitty.PNG

Cre­ate a new wave and add the Sub­mitty bot (submitty-bot@appspot.com), and Sub­mitty will cre­ate a sub­mis­sion form for you to fill out. At the bot­tom are a cou­ple of check­boxes. If you check either of these boxes, you’ll be prompted to fill in more infor­ma­tion about your bot and/or gad­get. Finally, you add the Exten­sion Review Group (google-wave-extensions-review@googlegroups.com) to your wave to sub­mit your extension.

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The Google Wave Templates (via Shinywave)

In Status on 2010-02-22 by Joshua Tagged:

The Google Wave Tem­plates — http://bit.ly/c7sv2K (via @shiny­wave) <3 the Doc from Tem­plate idea

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Lars: Remove Participant Feature due “Within a Month”

We have begun test­ing remove par­tic­i­pant inter­nally and hope­fully it will hit exter­nally within a month

Lars Ras­mussen, one of the lead Wave developers.

In a Wave enti­tled “Google Wave User Black List”, Lars piped up to offer advice on the best way to avoid and take action against known trolls and abusers and offered the above tit­bit about the immi­nent release of the abil­ity to remove par­tic­i­pants from Wave.

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Posted 2010-02-13 by Joshua

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Karma: A Way to Keep Wavers In Line?

In Link on 2010-02-04 by Joshua Tagged: , ,

Here’s a neat lit­tle gadget/bot combo that could prove very use­ful for pub­lic waves if the sys­tem caught on.

Add the Karma Gad­get and Bot to your waves and use it to rate your users (out of five stars). If users get con­sis­tently low scores, they will be auto­mat­i­cally kicked from Waves that choose to turn on this option.

Karma Rating Gadget

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Read a Wave in a Fast, Simple Interface

In Post on 2010-01-31 by Joshua Tagged: , , , , , ,

Want to share a pub­lic wave with some­one who hasn’t jumped on the Wave band­wagon? Need to pub­lish a Wave in a way that keeps it safe from edi­tors and wanna-be trolls? How ’bout this Wave Reader that takes a wave and dis­plays it as a web page with­out the reader need­ing an account.

wavereader.png

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Restore a Wave to a former state, or make it Read-Only.

In Post on 2010-01-23 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

In the first major update to the Google Wave client in what feels like ages, the Wave team have imple­mented two new fea­tures that will make a big dif­fer­ence in man­ag­ing your waves. The first fixes one of the most shock­ing things about the first release: that any­one you invited could come along and edit any part of your wave. Of course the point of Wave is col­lab­o­ra­tion, but some­times it was con­ceiv­able that you might not like any­one to be able to hack away at a wave, par­tic­u­larly once a wave was made pub­lic. Many good use­ful waves were effec­tively destroyed by grant­ing the pub­lic edit­ing rights.

the read-only tool in action
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Group Waves

In Link on 2009-12-09 by Joshua Tagged: , ,

Google has just unveiled their plans for group waves. The Google Wave Blog out­lines the steps to set up a Google Group (yes, you have to use another tool) then add the group as a con­tact in Google Wave.

The ser­vice does not yet allow you to add users by their googlewave.com account (gmail.com only), and the per­mis­sions can only be han­dled through the Google Groups inter­face. It also seems that to avoid spam (being able to send mes­sages to an every­one in a pub­lic group at once) users must pro-actively seek out the group wave and fol­low it to move it to their inbox [cur­rently wait­ing for con­fir­ma­tion of this].

Like any Wave fea­ture, this is still being devel­oped and its behav­iour could change over time. The Wave team have said they will con­tinue to enhance the groups fea­ture to make groups eas­ier to navigate.

Wav­ing with groups — Google Wave Blog.

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Google Wave and University

In Post on 2009-12-06 by Elle Tagged: , ,

Café Area Saltire Centre Glasgow Caledonian University

While attempt­ing to com­plete my first group assign­ment as an exter­nal stu­dent at Uni­ver­sity, I realised how much harder it was than while I was an inter­nal stu­dent.  If you’re an inter­nal stu­dent you see each other at least once a week,  mak­ing it hard to ignore the fact you have an upcom­ing assign­ment. Also you actu­ally get to meet and talk with peo­ple and elect  to be in their group (if the group selec­tion process is left to the stu­dents). Being exter­nal, I had to post a ran­dom post on the dis­cus­sion board and hope I was choos­ing the right peo­ple. And then hope they didn’t ignore my emails or wait a month or so to reply.

Google Wave would have been one of the best tools for this group assign­ment. Email meant a group of four peo­ple were all indi­vid­u­ally email­ing each other and also at times email­ing all four of the group. I ended up with snap­shots of what was hap­pen­ing, who was hav­ing what role, and what the plan was. With Google Wave, all the com­mu­ni­ca­tion would have been in one Wave, or even mul­ti­ple, but it would have been avail­able for the group to read and to add and edit. The plan of the assign­ment, of who was writ­ing what, and how we were writ­ing it could have been kept at the top of the wave, and edited as needed. The parts assigned to indi­vid­u­als could have been put in the wave and the group could know exactly where the assign­ment was up to, and edit other’s parts as we went.

The two main fea­tures of Google Wave which would have pos­i­tive affects on a uni­ver­sity group assign­ment, would have been the real time edit­ing and the abil­ity to high­light. Real time made it more like con­ver­sa­tion, with­out hav­ing to wait for emails to be sent, or hav­ing to work out who could pos­si­ble meet in the City to catch up. High­light­ing would allow those edits to be promi­nent or for indi­vid­u­als to rein­force any point they needed to make.