First aves

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.

Well, with the release of the Read-Only fea­ture, you can now spec­ify select users and groups as read-only par­tic­i­pants, mean­ing they can see your waves in pro­duc­tion, but can’t edit them them­selves. Per­fect for the thou­sands of infor­ma­tional waves that are avail­able, par­tic­u­larly those that might not have been edited in a while but might be ripe for archiv­ing. To make a user or group read-only, sim­ply click on their icon and select read-only from the new drop down box.

The sec­ond fea­ture is one of the other most requested tools — the abil­ity to restor a wave to a for­mer state. Those destroyed and dam­aged waves I men­tioned? Now they have a chance of resurec­tion, with­out the annoy­ing cut­ting and past­ing that went with the process before now. While play­ing back a wave, click Restore when you’re at the point before it all went pear-shaped. You won’t lose any data, as the state will be copied to the end of the play­back and you can still see the changed that were made after that point.

Between these two new (some would argue vital) tools, Wave becomes more than a novel real-time exper­i­ment, and begins to take shape as the use­ful doc­u­ment­ing, col­lab­o­ra­tion tool it always promised to be. Of course, there are still more changes needed before it becomes a reli­able col­lab­o­ra­tion tool (revert sin­gle blips, read-only main blips with post­ing rights) and the team promise much more in their announce­ment post, but this is a ter­rific first step.