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.

1. or third? [↩]
2. But is really – everybody knows, you guys [↩]
3. not really deep down [↩]
4. although I never knew why – it was pretty straight forward [↩]
5. or exploded [↩]

Since my last post more than a year ago, a lot has happened to Google Wave. Within months of opening Wave up to everyone at the Google I/O conference, Google pulled the plug, and Wave gurgled down the drain.

That left me feeling somewhat foolish, as I’d dedicated a good portion of my time to Wave: joining a group of Wave Watchers((a group dedicated to helping new wave users and maintaining some sense of order in the fun chaos that was Wave)) and maintaining this website. I never expected Wave to gather much support at first, but I honestly thought it would last longer than it did. It certainly seemed to me to have more momentum than it turned out to have.

So when I heard they were killing it off, I was left figuring out what to do with this website. I had a couple of ideas:

1. I thought I could change focus onto some other Google product, but honestly, none of them inspired me all that much: Buzz was a fairly bland FriendFeed clone that I couldn’t use from my normal account and messed up my Google Reader experience.
2. I could shift focus to a non-google product, but similarly, there was nothing all that awesome that I thought had much weight behind it. For instance, Novell’s Pulse was meant to be a Wave-like collaboration tool that was intended to federate with Google Wave itself – but Novell the company just doesn’t have the clout they used to have, and I knew Pulse wasn’t really going to take off. There are so many products out there that do much the same sort of thing, but they’re all these little walled-off social network wannabes.
3. I could continue with the open-source Wave project picked up by Apache. A few people are running with this, and it might be a fun project to monitor but it’s not moving as swiftly now that Google isn’t funding it.
4. I could generalise the focus to any product that might replace email as the fundamental communication of the internet. This would leave Facebook and Twitter and other Buzz-like products. This honestly appealed to me the most, but again the problem with most of these sorts of products is that they all live in their own little worlds and if I choose to use on Twitter for example, then I’m cut off from my wife who might choose to use Facebook.

So I thought about it and then just ignored the problem and hoped it would go away. Plus I started a new job that required a lot of time and energy and in the end, maintaining a website about a product or products that didn’t inspire me just… didn’t inspire me.

But a few days ago, Google announced Google+ (pronounced Google Plus if you couldn’t figure that out). It’s a “social networking layer” built over the top of some of their other products. It has some of the limitations of the products I decided not to focus on from the list above, but it’s got some promise and for the first time in a year, I’m excited about one of Google’s new products again.

So this site will now focus on Google+ for a while – until it takes off, or fails. My next post will explain why I’m excited by this, and why I’m writing about it when at first glance it seems no different to the products on the list. I’m also planning a newbie’s guide to bring non-techies up to date.

If you’re new here subscribe to the site! And if you’re a reader from long ago and my site’s just popped up again in your Reader, then Hi! Welcome Back! Thanks for sticking with me so long! Things are gonna ramp up around here!

It’s good to be back.

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.

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 josh@nunnone.com 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:

• Make waves I’ve started a slightly different colour (like sites where the author’s comments are shaded slightly blue).
• Don’t show icons at all in the inbox/searches (or make it easy to show and hide).
• Let me tag or bookmark specific blips within waves and make it obvious from the inbox which waves have “starred blips”.

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.

But it’s not going to happen overnight. It will be five years before we can say “this actually works.”

Lars Rasmussen on Google Wave via CNET UK.

Told you so