In Post on 2010-04-03 by Joshua
closeAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Email: josh@firstwaves.org
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows. You can Wave him at nunn.joshua@googlewave.comSee Authors Posts (99) Tagged: api, bots, collaboration, email, extensions
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?
In Post on 2010-03-30 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Email: josh@firstwaves.org
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows. You can Wave him at nunn.joshua@googlewave.comSee Authors Posts (99) Tagged: email, future, opinion, protocol
It’s Old
- Why it’s bad:
- Email was invented 40 years ago to deal with a very different set of communication problems. The web didn’t exist, and email was a simple way to get text from one place to another. Think black screens with green writing and geeks talking to geeks across America. Now we have Twitter, Facebook, and whole new ways to communicate, but our basic building block is email. Everything useful eventually finds an implementation in email, but it’s ill-suited for the task. Sure it’s universal, but just sending images was an afterthought!
- How Google Wave can help:
- It’s built on the latest proven internet technologies. It’s built from the ground up to handle rich media of all different types but still retains some of the things that worked for email in the beginning, like addresses using the @ symbol to send messages to the right place.
Read More »
In Post on 2010-03-05 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Email: josh@firstwaves.org
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows. You can Wave him at nunn.joshua@googlewave.comSee Authors Posts (99) Tagged: addon, direction, email, new feature, official help
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.
Read More »
In Post on 2009-10-27 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Email: josh@firstwaves.org
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows. You can Wave him at nunn.joshua@googlewave.comSee Authors Posts (99) Tagged: email, extensions, future, money, preview, roadmap, store
The Next Web attended the Google Wave GTUG (Google Technology User Group) meetup in London where Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon (the two responsible for Google Wave) gave a presentation on some upcoming Google Wave APIs. James Glick from The Next Web has included a dot-point summary of the most important parts, a few of which I have included below. Read his article for even more juicy inside information.
To cut a potentially exhausting blog post short, a summary of snippets from their presentation include:
Extension gallery to be fully up and running in months with a wider collection and sharing functionality.
An extension store is planned where developers would be able to display and charge for apps.
[… snipped …]
Google Wave will be able to be deployed within networks and intranets for organisations and companies to use internally.
Although it has been requested by a substantial amount of preview users, there are no plans to intergrate Gmail or any mail with Google Wave. The API
Read the article at The Next Web for more
The rest of the items on Glick’s list show Wave team is obviously committed to improving the experience for everyone. The four items I’ve included above highlight for me the potential for Wave to grow beyond the bounds of what Google can achieve and put it firmly in the hands of developers who can make it a thriving, useful tool. If Wave can ever dethrone email as the default form of communication, it will be because of these for things: The ability for developers to extend it and make money from it, for businesses to deploy their own secure versions, and for Wave to send and receive email. Although it looks like the Google team don’t have plans to bake email support in, I am confident it will not be long before such an extension is built and available.
In Post on 2009-10-18 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Email: josh@firstwaves.org
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows. You can Wave him at nunn.joshua@googlewave.comSee Authors Posts (99) Tagged: addon, bots, email, opinion
Emaily is a bot that sends an email alert for every new blip in a specified wave.
If your main inbox is your email inbox then this bot could be an important part of your wave testing, at least until Wave catches on with more of your personal network. Instead of keeping Wave open all day, have this bot send you a ping when anyone updates the important waves.
One day though I hope to see the flow reversed, and email will flow in and out of Wave instead.
Emaily [Wave Sample Gallery]
aves
