Privacy and Google Wave

November 26th, 2009 No Comments

In the modern world, and especially online, privacy is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Almost every click or site you visit is recorded somewhere in some way, and I do not think that the state of things will change anytime soon. I do think that there are some privacy considerations when using Google Wave.

Google Wave is both a step forward and a step back with regards to privacy. The fact that Wave uses a secure channel for all transmissions means that your aves are safe from prying eyes. Of course, the actual information is still stored on the Wave server (at this stage i do not know if it is stored encrypted or unencrypted), which of course raises the issue of how secure the server is, and how much you trust the company controlling the server (currently, most likely Google, but I think that will change as more companies start using their own Wave servers once the technology is fully ready for that).

The nice thing about waves is that it is possible to limit who you invite to a wave, and that way ensure that a discussion stays private (so long as you trust the other participants). Be careful when inviting bots, thought, since they are also able to see the discussion in a wave (although not in private blips, unless explicitly invited to them), and often log stuff from the wave for troubleshooting purposes. The couple of bots that I have seen that do this are very open about it, but it is something to keep in mind when using them. Of course, bots are unable to see private blips that they are not invited to. Extensions do not have this issue, since they cannot see anything of the wave they are in that is outside them.

  • Share/Bookmark
Read More »

The Deceleration of Independence Recreated in Google Wave

November 25th, 2009 No Comments

Lars Rasmussen, as a way to illustrate a way to use Google Wave has recreated the American Declaration of Independence in this wave. It is an interesting illustration, and I can encourage everyone to take a look at it, especially the playback.

(via Gizmodo)

  • Share/Bookmark
Read More »

Monetizing Google Wave

November 24th, 2009 1 Comment

google-money

As with any new technology, the same with Google Wave, as we speak, people are wondering “How can we make money from it?”. As far as I know nobody is directly making money from Wave at the moment, but that is bound to change soon, especially when wae becomes public, sometime in 2010.

How Google will make Money from Wave

Google are a company, and, as such, they want to actually make money from their product. At the moment, I highly doubt that wave is in the least bit profitable for Google, and is probably costing them money. I can only see two methods that Google can use to monetize wave:

  1. Advertising – This is the method that Google is using to make money on all of their products, and I do not think that wave will be an exception to that. I expect that the full version of wave will incorporate advertising in some way, either in the interface, or somehow worked into the wave itself. The wealth of information available to Google on the Wave users should make the advertising fairly well targeted.
  2. Custom Wave Setups - This would involve setting up and maintaining Wave Servers for individual companies. While theoretically anybody could set up and run a wave server, at this point, Google are the only company with any experience in it, and I can easily see larger companies wanting their own Wave servers.

Of course, the benefits of Wave for Google extend to much more than just the potential for profit, since they benefit from the huge amount of data that the wavers are making available to them, as well as the publicity associated with wave.

How Other People Will make Money from Wave

Ironically enough, other people have more ways to make money from wave than Google itself, some of which I will list below. I am not going to talk about selling invites here, since I believe that it is a very short term trend, which is ending already.

There are some monetization techniques that are common on the net, that will surely find their way to wave, for good or ill:

  1. Spam - Might as well get this one out of the way first… Like any communication medium, ever, somebody is going to figure out a way to spam Google Wave, and possibly even to make it profitable. At the moment, since anybody can invite anybody to a wave, this would be easy, but the small size of the current Google Wave community seems to have limited spam attempts. The other factor which will limit them is the fact that it is impossible to send out messages without revealing who they are from, so that will make it easier to root out spammers, although I suspect that they will simply end up using disposable accounts.
  2. Advertising - I can easily see people selling advertising space on popular waves (especially public ones), although this is unlikely to happen without stricter editing controls.
  3. Affiliate Marketing - This is a variation on the advertising idea above. In affiliate marketing, the person gets a certain percentage of each sale of a product that comes in through their link. There is no reason why nobody is doing this on the wave at the moment, but so far I have seen no evidence for it.
  4. Subscriber only waves - Another method that would require better access control, but there are many ways that this could work. It could be a community of experts that the customers buys access to, or simply a social club.
  5. Sales of Bots and Extensions - There are already some companies working on this, basically the idea is to create bots and extensions, and charge a fee for their use, normally with a shareware model (the bot or extension can be used for free, but has limited functionality, or perhaps can only be used for a couple of weeks)

Of course, in addition to the methods above, people are using wave to help with their other work, as a collaboration platform. I think that we will see many businesses moving onto wave soon.

  • Share/Bookmark
Read More »

Wave vs. IM

November 20th, 2009 1 Comment

I was chatting with my wife over Google Talk earlier, and I realized how much I missed the way wave lets me see what she is saying as she types. I think I am already getting spoiled by the immediacy of wave.

  • Share/Bookmark
Read More »

What I would like to see in Google Wave

November 19th, 2009 4 Comments

Google Wave is still in Preview, and as such is continuously being developed. Here, I will list some improvements that I would like to see in the platform, and that I think will hugely improve its usefulness to me and to other people.

So, without further ado, I present…

Things I would like to see in Wave

  • Better control over permissions - As things stand at the moment, any participant can do whatever they want within a wave. Although at the moment, most people do not abuse the privilege, I would like to have some way of saying who can do what within a wave, so that I can give people the right to edit the wave, but not invite other participants, or possible give somebody ‘observer’ status: They can view the wave, but not change it. Apparently Google is working on this, so I eagerly await it.
  • Locking a Wave - I would like to be able to declare a wave “finished”, so that nobody can change it any way. We know that Google already has this ability, since a lot of waves from Google are marked as read only. I guess that the reason why they are not releasing the functionality to the public yet is that, without proper permission and right handling, this can cause no end of problems for wave users.
  • Linking to Individual Blips - Waves get big… Very big, sometimes. i would like to be able to link to an individual blip within a wave, so that I can directly send a person to a relevant portion of the wave
  • Tagging Individual Blips - A variation on the above. I would like to be able to tag individual blips, for very much the same reason as I give above.
  • Removing People - Related to permission control. I would like to be able to remove a person from a wave, if they are being annoying, or just if the wave is not relevant for them. At the moment, even removing myself from the wave is a tricky proposition, although I can trash a wave, so that I no longer can see it.
  • Splitting Waves - I would like to be able to split off a blip into another wave. It would be very useful for discussions that drift off topic, so that we can continue without corrupting the main wave. The current setup can copy the single blip, but not any blips derived from that.
  • Draft - Yes, there is a tick for it in the interface, but the functionality still needs to be implemented. It would be nice to be able to draft a reply without anyone seeing what I am typing. While realtime is cool sometimes, at other times, I actually need to calmly think about what I want to type.
  • Email Integration - It would be nice if I could receive emails in my Google Wave Account, so that an email that arrives to my Google Wave email address gets converted into a wave automatically.
  • The Ability to Move Windows around - While I like the current interface, it would be a good idea for me to be able to reposition and resize the wave windows as I wanted to. It would make certain uses of the wave a lot simpler. For Example, have a large wave window for a video player, and a smaller one for the discussion about it.
  • The Ability to Access Wave Tags - For some reason the current Google Wave API does not give developers access to the wave tags. I really think that enabling this would allow developers to write even more impressive extensions and bots than they already are.
  • The Ability to Have Personal Tags - Sometimes I would like to add tags to a wave for my own personal use, which I would not want the other participants in a wave to see. At the moment the only way to do anything like that is putting the wave in a folder, but the wave can only be in one folder at a time.
  • The Ability to Tag Contacts - This is something that I have always wanted in a social platform (and wave is a social platform, among other things)… I would like to be able to see at a glance which of my contacts are web designers, and which ones are my roleplaying pals.
  • Displaying Hidden Buttons - This is actually a bug in the current setup… When a wave panel is too small, some functionality is simply inaccessible… It would be nice to have some way of seeing the buttons hidden due to the small size of the panel
  • Saving My Setup - At the moment, every time I log into Wave, it displays the default screen setup… It would be nice if it remembered the setup I had the previous time, and return me to that.

Of course, there is a whole wave devoted to discussing possible fixes and improvements, and I do know that the Google engineers are working very hard on improving the user experience with wave. It is possible that there are ways to get what I want by using bots or extensions, and if my readers could point me to any, I would be very grateful.

  • Share/Bookmark
Read More »

A Very Funny Explanation of Wave in Theory vs. Wave in Practice

November 18th, 2009 1 Comment

Just an image I found at The Next Web, I thinks it’s very funny and accurate of the way wave currently is set up.

Google Wave Theory vs. Practice

Google Wave Theory vs. Practice

  • Share/Bookmark
Read More »

Random Lee Twenty Review

November 17th, 2009 2 Comments

As some of you might have gathered, I am interested in gaming on Google Wave, and as such I have decided to test out one of the more popular dicebots out there, Random Lee Twenty.

You might have seen him if you frequent any roleplaying waves, he usually looks something like this:

randomleetwenty

As far as usage goes, Lee is very easy to use, to roll dice, you just need to type in: zdx + y, where z is the number of dice you wish to roll, x is the number of sides of each die, and y is the number to add to the total (the d is just a d).

for example:

2d6+8

d20+15 (You can leave out the 1 in front if you are just rolling one die)

d4 (The same with the number after the plus if it is 0)

In addition to the basic rolling, Lee Twenty has a lot of support for other rolling systems for specific games (including FATE, Burning Wheel, World of Darkness, and numerous others). In addition to that, you can specify target numbers, and what to display if the roll passes/fails. To figure out how to do all that, you might want to check out their Official Site.

Lee Twenty is continuously in development, and the author is very responsive to user feedback. The Lee Twenty Wave is very active, and a good place to discuss useful features and bugs for the bot.

Overall, I think that Lee Twenty stands head and shoulders above all other dicebots I have seen, either in or outside Google Wave.

  • Share/Bookmark
Read More »

The Google Wave Links (weekly)

November 15th, 2009 No Comments

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

  • Share/Bookmark
Read More »

Follow/Unfollow Buttons

November 13th, 2009 1 Comment

I just recently noticed that Google has made another very welcome improvement to Wave: the follow/unfollow button.

Up until now, you got added as a participant to any public wave that you viewed, which led to a fairly cluttered inbox (just because I looked at a Wave does not always mean that I am interested in further developments in it.).

This has changed with the addition of the follow unfollow button, which you can see if you are looking at a public wave.

Follow Unfollow

In addition to clicking the follow button, the wave will be automatically followed if you edit it in any way.

  • Share/Bookmark
Read More »

Getting Started with Google Wave

November 12th, 2009 No Comments

There are a lot of blog posts about getting started with Google Wave, and I did not think that another one was necessary, until one of my readers posted a comment asking how to get started, so here is my take on the best way to get started on Google Wave.

The first thing you should do when you get your google wave invite and login is to look around, and get familiar with the interface. Read the welcome waves that google provides, and just generally see what is going on. You might want to also look at the available keyboard shortcuts.

Create a wave to play around in, just with yourself as the only participant. Here, you can try out some of the extensions, and see how they work. Once you are ready, you can always invite more people to join you in testing. If you are struggling to think of people, feel free to invite me (plosiguant@googlewave.com). Waving with other people will give you a chance to see the real time and collaborative nature of wave.

The next step would be to check out the public waves (just do a search for “with:public” + whatever keyword you are interested in). This way you will get to see what other people are using wave for, and you can always join whichever waves seem interesting to you.

Feel free to join in the discussion on any public waves that you find interesting. In my experience, all the people on Google wave are friendly and supportive. You might want to read my article on wave etiquette before you start posting, first.

You might also want to think of a project that you would like to use Google Wave for, either as part of your work, or for your own personal interests. If you want to you can join a public Wave project, such as the Writing Project (a collaborative novel written on wave by anybody willing to do so), or the Complete Wave Guide (A book about how to use google wave, written as a Wave).

And the most important thing about getting started with Wave (or anything else) is: Enjoy yourself… Play around with the features and searches, and see what you can come up with (and if it is something interesting, tell me about it!).

  • Share/Bookmark
Read More »
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
Subscribe to RSS Feed Follow me on Twitter!