Google Wave is a social space (among other things), and is used for interaction and communication between people. As such, certain standards of behavior will need to be observed in order to make using the Wave smooth and enjoyable for everyone. With a new virtual environment, like Google Wave, what these standards are is something which will develop over time, although certain agreements are starting to emerge.

Tthe entirety of the rules below can be summed up with “don’t be a douchebag”.

Having said that, here are some more specific guidelines, of course this will vary from wave to wave.

The Etiquette Wave is a wave giving out some rules of etiquette. This article is based on that wave and my own observations.

Standard Netiquette

These are the rules of online etiquette, already established by forums, social media and Internet Messaging systems, they apply on Wave as well.

• Do not use ALL CAPS. All Caps signify that you are shouting, and that would be considered rude in most situation.
• Use the same language as all the other participants in the wave. If for some reason you would prefer to have a discussion in another language, create a separate wave, and link to it from the original one.
• When it comes to language, try to keep swearing to a minimum. Obviously, if everybody else in the wave is swearing up a storm, than feel free to join in, but generally speaking, you want to keep the discussion at  civil level.
• While spelling and grammar are not as important as they used to be, try to make your posts and comments easy to understand.
• Do not post promotional material, unless it is relevant (In other words, do not spam)
• Do not link to porn or nudity, without at least warning the people reading. A lot of people are accessing wave from work, and it is considered polite to include something like NSFW (Not Safe for Work) next to a link that could be considered questionable.

Wave Netiquette

Here are some standards which are specific to wave. Like I said earlier, everything is still developing, but these seem to be the emerging norms.

• The person posting the initial blip (the first blip in the wave) is generally considered the go-to person for etiquette decisions. They sometimes chose to set explicit rules for the Wave, in which case any participant to the wave is expected to follow them. At the moment, there is no way to enforce any of these rules. If there is any doubt, you can always ask the person for clarification in a blip. The Moderation tags (as defined in this wave ) are sometimes used to indicate what sort of permissions the wave owner wants to give to the participants.
• Do not link to non-public waves from public ones. This is just annoying, since the people who are on the wave already know about it, and the people who are not will just get an error.
• If a wave is private, do not make it public, without the permission of the owner of the wave.
• Warn if linking from a private wave to a public one, since anybody viewing the public wave gets added to it automatically, and some people would prefer to keep their google wave ids private.
• Keep disagreements, especially heated ones, to private blips
• Do not add bots or gadgets to a public wave, unless you are the wave starter
• It is normally considered polite to remove any empty blips you see, if they are older than about an hour (they are often produced by mistake)

Developing Areas

There are still some areas where there is room for discussion, such as:

• When is it Ok to invite other participants to a private wave? – There is some work being done with this in the Wave Classification Model wave (link to wave, will only work for those with a wave account), which classifies how open the information in the wave should be.
• When is it Ok to edit somebody else’s blip? – The current norm seems to be that the initial blip is open for editing (although in some waves the owner can declare it not to be), since that is normally the document that is the focus of the wave. Lots of people support editing down a blip discussion to summarize it, although you should generally ask, in order to avoid causing offence.
• When can you change the tagging structure of a Wave? – According to the etiquette guide, you should not, but in practice people seem to use the tagging functionality without any limitations.
• When to use inline blips, and when to use a simple reply? – I support using inline blips for simple responses, that do not really add much to the discussion (things such as indicating agreement, without adding anything else  to the discussion), or when you are replying directly to another blip. In practice, this is one of the areas where there seems to be no norm yet.
• Is it ok to interrupt someone while they are typing? – Should you wait for somebody to finish before you stat responding to their post? It seems that most people do wait, although I have seen some cases where they do not… I would think that the principle of “don’t interrupt” should be adhered to even in the wave.

We are all still trying to figure out how to best use Google Wave. In order to do that, we will also need to figure out how to use it to communicate with each other. On the Wave, like anywhere else, I think we should just try to treat each other with respect, and the rules of behavior will emerge from that.

Etiquette Wave

Wave Classification Model

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Related posts:

1. Wave Defacement
2. Privacy and Google Wave
3. Getting Started with Google Wave