Posts Tagged "collaboration"

In yesterday’s open thread, I used Mr-Ray by wave.to to allow non-wavers to access a wave. Mr-Ray’s real purpose is to be an intermediary between Wavers and emailers. It does this by creating a simple wave interface when you add someone to a wave by their email address.

Well Mr-Ray wasn’t the first attempt to get Wave and Email to interoperate. A couple of Googlers used their “20% time” to create Emaily, a bot that behaves very similarly to Mr-Ray on the Wave side, but tackles the email side of things a little differently. When you add Emaily, it first creates an email address for you on its servers. Then when you add the address of a non-waver, it sends an email to that person with the details of your update and they can reply right from their email. I have to say, it creates a pretty seamless bridge between the two worlds from the email side. In Wave though, you get to see their entire email shoehorned into a wave, with “>” reply markers and signatures left in. For anything more than simple communication back and forth this could get messy.

The developers of Emaily have said they are planning to integrate Emaily even more into Wave by “rearchitecting Emaily into an application, which uses more of the internal Google services”. Hopefully this could be the beginning of actual built-in email capability in Wave that could speed the transition of more users from old technology to new.

Try it today. Add “emaily-wave@appspot.com” to a wave and send an email to a non-wave friend! Will extensions like Emaily and Mr-Ray help you transition to Wave any faster?

One of the biggest complaints from first time Google Wave users is the tidal wave of information and updates that threatens to suck their precious time away as they watch the chaos unfold.

In a carefully tended wave, the noise and chaos are minimal, but in some of the larger (public) waves, users have given up hop of ever keeping on top of it all.

Charles Lehner has created a simple chat gadget that might help calm the swell, by focussing some of the chat into a form most of us will recognise: IM. By introducing this gadget to a wave, you can give people an outlet to speak that brings in years of built up convention for managing the flow. People understand Instant Messaging, so you can add this gadget to bring  normalcy to the new medium.

Perhaps you could embed this in a wave and encourage people to use it for idle chitchat, leaving the rest of the wave for the real-time collaboration on the task at hand.

As with other gadgets the Playback function records every new person who gets to the chat, and every message, so be aware that this can blow the size of your wave recording out with a lot of extra updates to wade through if necessary.

“Retro” Chat for Google Wave [Wave Samples Gallery]