Posts Tagged ‘new feature’

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Google Wave Gets Email Notifications

In Post on 2010-03-05 by Joshua Tagged: , , , ,

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.

NotificationsMenu.png

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Restore a Wave to a former state, or make it Read-Only.

In Post on 2010-01-23 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

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.

the read-only tool in action
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Group Waves

In Link on 2009-12-09 by Joshua Tagged: , ,

Google has just unveiled their plans for group waves. The Google Wave Blog out­lines the steps to set up a Google Group (yes, you have to use another tool) then add the group as a con­tact in Google Wave.

The ser­vice does not yet allow you to add users by their googlewave.com account (gmail.com only), and the per­mis­sions can only be han­dled through the Google Groups inter­face. It also seems that to avoid spam (being able to send mes­sages to an every­one in a pub­lic group at once) users must pro-actively seek out the group wave and fol­low it to move it to their inbox [cur­rently wait­ing for con­fir­ma­tion of this].

Like any Wave fea­ture, this is still being devel­oped and its behav­iour could change over time. The Wave team have said they will con­tinue to enhance the groups fea­ture to make groups eas­ier to navigate.

Wav­ing with groups — Google Wave Blog.

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Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow the Waves You Choose

In Post on 2009-11-12 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

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.

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