Surfing Google Wave

Twitter Clients in Wave

February 9th, 2010 No Comments

I first heard about wave on twitter, and it it hardly surprising that there are a number of attempts to integrate the two platforms. Here I will take a look at two bots used to access twitter from Google Wave: WaveTweets and TweetyWave.

Both of these bots work in a very similar way, displaying your twitter feed, with each tweet appearing as a separate blip in the wave. They both also suffer the problem that all the participants within the wave are able to tweet on behalf of the person that logged into the bots.

The only difference I have seen between the two of these is the fact that TweetyWave makes it very hard to tell who a tweet is coming from, while wavetweets adds the name of the person it is from.

I really would not recommend either of these bots for use with twitter, unless you feel that you have to do absolutely everything from within wave… I am sure that somebody will write a better twitter client for wave, until then, I am sticking with TweetDeck.

The International Nature of Wave

January 28th, 2010 2 Comments

Google Wave is an international phenomenon, and people all over the planet have joined the wave. A simple check through the public waves will prove this, with the variety of languages that the discussions are being conducted in.

Of course, one of the big barriers to international co-operation is visible right there, namely the variety of languages that people use for communication. Wave also has a way to work around that, with bots such as Aunt Rosie (aunt-rosie@appspot.com), which uses Google Translate to translate blip contents through Google Translate, which I think will really help people join in the conversation, even though the translations are still very crude in some ways.

Wave is also very well suited to working across timezones, since the messages stay, and can be responded to in any order.

GTD and Google Wave

January 26th, 2010 2 Comments

I am a big believer in the Getting Things Done methodology of staying organised, and of course, I seek to understand how it can be used with Google Wave.

Getting Things Done (GTD for short) was created by David Allen, in his book entitled, unsurprisingly, Getting Things Done.

The central idea of GTD is that everything that catches your attention gets captured, and the decisions what to do about it are taken later, and recorded, you can get a good overview of GTD from 43 folders, which goes into far more depth than I do in this article. If you are not familiar with GTD, read the 43 folders article, before continuing with this one, otherwise this might not make much sense.

First of all, there is the Google Wave inbox, which acts just like any other inbox in the GTD system, with a bunch of items that need to be processed. This is fairly easy in wave, especially with the space bar to bring any unread items to your attention. I have personally found it helpful to create a custom search that display only unread items in the inbox, allowing me to get through them faster, and ensuring they disappear from view once I have done so.

The fact that everything in wave is recorded is very useful for reviews, and for taking notes… It could be used to record things as they come up, instead of dedicated note-taking software.

I have given some thought to actually implementing GTD in Wave, possibly by using separate waves for each project and context, but decided that I would need to write some fairly involved robots to actually get anything working. Wave is just not suited for that sort of thing at the moment, although it would be useful for working with teams.

Wave in 2010

January 8th, 2010 3 Comments

So, after my previous post, examining how wave did in 2009, what can we expect from Google Wave in 2010?

The biggest thing that we can expect this year is the release of Google Wave to the public, which Google has implied will happen sometime this year. The very announcement implies that they expect to have wave stable and mostly finished sometime during the year, since it will be out of preview, and ready to be used properly.

The other big thing, which has not been given a specific date, is the launch of the app store for Wave. It will be interesting to see how Google handles that, and how the third party developers will adjust to that. I think we will see more companies shifting their attention to developing wave apps, with smaller companies emerging that specialise in that. We will know more as Google releases more details. At the moment everything is very vague, and might not even happen this year, although I really hope it does.

Those two facts combined hopefully mean that the functionality open to the API will be cleaned up and expanded, so that developers can have full control over waves from third party applications.

On the negative side, I expect to see a growth in wave spam (wpam?) as well as the tools to counter it, possibly starting with permission control in waves. From my experiences with GMail, I know that Google is very good at filtering out spam, and I hope that they will bring those experiences and skills to bear on wave as well.

Overall, 2010 should be an exciting year for wave, and I predict that it will be the year when wave “comes of age”, and people start using it for more serious and full projects and applications.

Google Wave Invitation Sales

January 6th, 2010 No Comments

While investigating a site that made a trackback to me (which will not be mentioned here for reasons that will shortly become obvious), I saw that it was offering Google Wave invitations for sale. (The price was $4.88, in case any of you are wondering).

They did put in a lot of effort into appearing genuine, even going so far as to claim that they are selling authorized wave invites, and using Google Checkout for the payment processing.

Whether they actually provide invites for those stupid enough to give them money, I do not know, and I am not going to risk my credit card in finding out. The best case scenario is that you end up paying for something that you can get for free. (If anybody still wants an invite, I am more that happy to share the ones I have, I still have over twenty at the time of this writing).

I have reported the site in question to Google, and I have not been able to find any others. I just thought I would get this out there as a cautionary tale.

Happy New Year

January 1st, 2010 5 Comments

Happy New Year to all my readers!

Apparently this is the year that wave is supposed to go open to the public, so it should be interesting to wait and see what happens!

Looking Back

December 29th, 2009 1 Comment

Well, it is the end of the year now, as the more observant of my readers may have noticed. As is the tradition, we can now take the time to reflect about how Google Wave has changed over the past year. Due to the fact that it only really launched recently, this should be a short article.

For pretty much everyone outside of Google, Google Wave started on May 27, with Google’s video showing off wave’s capabilities, and making as drool at a chance to play with it. While some people got sandbox access soon after that, the real launch of Wave for a lot of people was in September 2009, when Google issued the first 100 000 invites to the preview version of Google Wave.

The few lucky people to get invites where soon innundated with requests for more invites (I have to admit at this point, that this is how I got one myself). At this point, some even tried selling invites on eBay, although eBay soon put a stop to that.

Those of us that got in at this stage, where in for a new experience. While wave was very buggy and unfinished (even more so than now), it still provided a new way to communicate and collaborate. The only problem was finding people to do it with, since the dearth of invites meant that most of the people I wanted to wave with just were not there. Of course, there were the public waves, giving the wave a very social feel, which somewhat influenced the way people viewed wave ever since.

Soon after I joined wave, there was a second, smaller, round of invites, allowing me to bring some friends and co-workers into wave. Wave was slowly taking form, with the team working hard in the background, with constant improvements, some visible and some not immediately. I think that for every improvement that the blogs talked about, there were a couple of dozen in the background, improving the stability and responsiveness, with no changes in the UI, and hence nobody knew about them. Standards and norms were emerging out of the chaos of wavers.

More recently, Google released a ton of invites, with most people (including yours truly), now having far more than they know what to do with (anybody still want one?). Despite that, wave seems less active, with fewer posts and updates, as the sheer novelty starts to wear off.

Well, the past year has been very interesting for the wave, with it emerging, getting very popular, and now it seems to be slowly getting settled into a more sustainable state. Through out the year, the Google Wave team seems to have done a lot of work on improving it, and have been very responsive about the feedback from those in preview.

Merry Christmas!

December 25th, 2009 No Comments

Merry Christmas and happy holidays for all my readers. I hope you are enjoying yourselves, whatever you are doing!

A Short Break

December 19th, 2009 No Comments

Well, I am leaving today to visit some friends in Germany, so updates for this blog will stop until I come back. Enjoy your holidays, whichever ones you happen to celebrate (or if you do not celebrate any of them).

Google in Psychology

December 17th, 2009 No Comments

Google Wave could see use in psychology and coaching, although I am not aware of anybody doing this at the moment. If anybody is doing it, such waves would be private for obvious reasons. I am not a psychologist, but I have given some thought about how Google Wave could be use by various counselling professions.

While there is still no substitute for direct human contact, Google Wave has several features which mean that it could easily be used by counsellors and coaches.

It is immediate, in the same way that IM is, and the real time nature of the wave ‘feels’ a bit more like talking with a real person. There are many extensions that could be used to do voice or video chat as well, making the experience even more real.
The patient/client can interact from the comfort of their own home. Besides the convenience, this might help to make the person feel more relaxed and in control
You can have multiple people on a wave, giving a group therapy vibe to the proceedings
The information is recorded, allowing for review later, either by the therapist, or even the patient to monitor his progress.
The client can use wave to keep a journal, with the possibility of using private notes to himself for things he would prefer his therapist not to see immediately, or perhaps have the journal private, and simply split off new waves with things he would like to discuss.
The secure procedures used for wave transmission will ensure that conversations stay private.

Anyway, these are just some ideas. I would love to hear from somebody who actually has some formal training in psychology or coaching, and especially for anyone that has used wave in this way.

For a Clearer Understanding of Google Wave and its Application