First aves

Prob­a­bly the most impor­tant part of the Wave expe­ri­ence for new user has been the abil­ity to search for pub­lic waves to join. With­out Pub­lic Waves many peo­ple would not have enough of a net­work to really expe­ri­ence Wave in full, and the Wave com­mu­nity may not have grown as quickly as it has. Pub­lic Waves have allowed quick access to tips and tricks, unof­fi­cial sup­port and gen­eral chit chat on a diverse range of topics.

The down­side of this was a sig­nif­i­cant gotcha: just click­ing a pub­lic wave was enough to add you to the Wave per­ma­nently and drag the wave into your inbox. From that point, your only recourse to silence the wave was to mute it (archiv­ing only works as long as no one else con­tributes), and mut­ing does not remove you from the wave.

The inabil­ity to remove your­self from a wave you have par­tic­i­pated in is an account­ing fea­ture I guess. When the devel­op­ment team finally gives us the abil­ity to remove our­selves, we still need to know which waves we have par­tic­i­pated in.

But back to the sticky busi­ness of aut­o­fol­low­ing pub­lic waves. What it meant was the risk of asso­ci­at­ing with Waves you never meant to fol­low. A mis­placed click (very easy in the fast-flowing river of pub­lic waves) meant a new wave in your inbox and your face on the top of a wave. For exam­ple, click­ing a wave called  “I hate my boss” imme­di­ately asso­ci­ated you with that wave!

Today Google have rolled out a new fea­ture to fix this. Two new but­tons now let you Fol­low and Unfol­low a wave. When you click on an inter­est­ing pub­lic wave, you are no longer added auto­mat­i­cally. Once you click off that wave, it will dis­ap­pear into the stream and you will have no fur­ther part in it. To mon­i­tor it in your inbox/folder struc­ture, you can now choose to fol­low it (using the Fol­low but­ton of course), and it will move into your inbox, where you can treat it like any other wave you are in. You can move it to fold­ers, searches will include it and it will behave like a nor­mal wave with one key dif­fer­ence: you will not appear in the list of wave users at the top.

This makes a huge dif­fer­ence, and means that pub­lic waves now take on a sort of social net­work­ing aspect, as you can fol­low the infor­ma­tion and peo­ple who inter­est you with­out being directly involved (sort of like feed read­ers or Twit­ter lists). It also improves the user expe­ri­ence by mak­ing pub­lic waves some­thing you have to explic­itly choose to have in your inbox.

To remove a wave from your inbox, you can sim­ply click Unfol­low and the wave will dis­ap­pear as though it was never there.

Keep in mind though that the pub­lic wave behaves as it used to the sec­ond you edit it. As soon as you cre­ate or edit a blip, the wave will add you as a par­tic­i­pant and the wave will appear in your inbox as though you had fol­lowed the wave. This makes per­fect sense, as par­tic­i­pa­tion trig­gers all the account­ing mea­sures that must keep track of who made what changes. Unfol­low will not remove you from the wave, it will merely be archived from view (the old Mute function).

All in all these changes are a wel­come fix to one of the most vex­ing prob­lems of the ini­tial release. I look for­ward to see­ing the other improve­ments as Google Wave develops!

Fol­low your waves — Google Wave Blog.