The Geekorium

So I’m hanging out on Google+. I mean literally of course - the second¹ new social network that Google has launched in the last couple of years has a “hangout” feature where you can chat with lots of friends simultaneously via video. I’ve never tried it, so I’m sitting here in the hopes that someone will join in with me. No one has come past yet, but I think that says more about Australian/American time difference and my own social ineptness than the popularity of the feature. I hear very good things about it.

This article isn’t about that feature specifically. This is about Google+ in general. The new social network that totally isn’t trying to out-social Facebook². It seems quite a hit! But then so was Buzz initially. You remember Buzz? The social network built knee-deep into GMail that a lot of people tried, but no one really liked³. There was also Wave - but that never made sense to most people⁴. I mock, but only out of love. Google, despite their failures are not a company to give up on something once they have it in their sights, and understandably they want to get in on this “social” act.

What “social” means exactly is anyone’s guess, but in vague terms it means somehow putting all that information you generate when you browse the web and share the cool stuff you find with your friends to use. Sites like Facebook are all about giving you a central place to post videos and photos you like so other people can see how witty and clever you are for liking Transformers before they were ruined⁵ by Michael Bay. This sort of sharing has come a long way since the web was made. It used to be that you had to own your own website and manually copy/paste links and videos into your pages and hope to hell that people might find, and occasionally re-visit, your site. Then sites like Blogger and Wordpress came along and made that somewhat easier, then Tumblr and Facebook - making those sorts of short and snappy link sharing posts easier and easier to do. Now you wave your mouse in the direction of the Facebook tab and it pulls out that it’s a Youtube video and picks out the title and description and even embeds the video, and you barely have to do anything. Well now Google is heading one step further. They aren’t there right now - Google+ is still a lot like Facebook on the surface - but deeper down the steps are there to become something massive.

Google+ is a service where you share your links, photos and videos with people in your “Circles”. You group the people you know into named Circles to make sharing easier and less prone to accidents of the “sharing photos of myself drunk with Aunt Sally” variety. For example, you create a “Work” circle, a “Family” circle and potentially a “Drunk shenanigans” circle. Then each time you post a picture or a report, you can easily assign it to be seen by the appropriate group. For the record: Facebook offers a similar option, but I’ve rarely used it, and I can’t imagine my mum has ever bothered.

Then there’s the Hangout feature I’ve mentioned above. When you’re online, you can set up your webcam for chats with whichever friends happen to be browsing Google+ at the time.

The third major feature at launch is “Sparks” - a kind of automatic interesting article finder. Type in a few keywords about what you’re interested in, and you get your stream filled with articles that match those keywords. I find this feature somewhat limited at the moment. A few of the articles it’s uncovered have been interesting, but mostly it’s just more of the same sort of thing I can get at one or more of a dozen similar services. Once it’s fully integrated into everyone’s Google account though - like my mum’s - I can imagine it being useful for some people to find new and interesting articles they might otherwise not go searching for.

Thus we get to the crux of the matter: integration. Google practically runs the web right now, despite the valiant efforts of Microsoft and up-and-comers like Duck Duck Go, and despite the sneak-in-from-behind services like Twitter and Facebook. If you want an answer to something you most likely start at Google and work your way from there. But Google recognise it’s only a matter of time before someone takes that “social” power that other sites like Twitter and Facebook have and turn it into a more useful information finding service. The power of social is to hopefully take it one step further and start recommending things to you before you even recognise you were looking for it. To help you dig out more reliable information - reliable because a friend or relative has already used it and shared about it⁶. Google is the biggest search engine on the planet and has been for years. On top of that, Google has sites like Blogger (for web pages) and Picasa (for photos) and - because you might not have actually heard of those - Youtube for video.

Google’s plan with Google+ has already started. You can “Plus One” any search result to indicate to other people in your networks that a particular website is a good result - similar to Facebook’s “Like” button, but on your search page. Now website owners can embed these buttons onto their sites, and you can “Plus One” after you’ve visited - the results are shown to your friends in their Google searches.

The next step will be to turn this functionality on on Youtube and their other properties. When you “Like” a video - soon to become “+1” no doubt - this will be added to your list of +1s on your profile and I’m imagining eventually integrated into your stream. As more and more Google properties are built onto the Google Plus platform, stuff you have found useful or beautiful or interesting will be offered to your friends and family as reliable content that they might also find useful or beautiful or interesting. It’s all part of Google’s plan to find ways to understand what you do on the web and make themselves more useful so you use them more⁷. It’s a grand vision. It’s easy to imagine this as the start of something big, which is why I’m so excited about it.

Of course at the moment, it’s all seems much like the other services we know and love. This is not a bad thing. The fact that you can take your knowledge of Facebook (or Buzz etc) and move into Google+ is a huge bonus at starting time. If Google can layer more functionality over the top of this simple base, I imagine Google+ being a powerhouse of sharing and a massive database of knowledge.

This is just my initial reaction/summation of Google+. The best way to find out what it’s about is to give it a go. I’ve got some invites if you’d like to try it! Check out my +Josh posts and put me in one of your circles.

Today at the Google I/O Conference (the same one that Google Wave was announced at last year) Lars Rasmussen gave a brief update on Google Wave. The biggest news is that Google Wave is now available for any one to sign up without an invitation. This makes it much more likely that large groups will just get started collaborating on Wave without having to coordinate Wave invitations for everyone. While the service was invite-only it had the appearance of being a “tech elite” product. As more people found uses for it in group situations (classrooms, meetings) the need to make it easy for the people that actually wanted to use the product to do so became obvious.

In a guest post on the Huffington Post, Lars explains:

For this reason, today we opened up Google Wave to everyone. You no longer need an invitation to use the service. Simply go to wave.google.com and sign right in. Likewise, if you administer a Google Apps domain, you can now easily enable Google Wave for all your users at no extra cost. Google Wave is now officially part of Google Labs, the same place my team launched Google Maps close to 5 years ago.If you tried Google Wave earlier and found it not quite ready for real use, we think you’ll find that a lot has changed, and now is a good time to give it another look.

Lars Rasmussen in the Huffington Post

Did you catch that second part? That was the other half of the announcement: Google Wave is now live for all Apps for Your Domain accounts! If you are using Gmail or Google Calendar on your own domain name, you can now use Google Wave too, and it integrates fully with the normal Google Wave experience. Those of you who have been waiting for this since launch, or since Linkoping University announced it for their students, well wait no more!

It took about 3 hours from the announcement to being able to add Wave to my own domain account. Setup is a breeze. Click the “Add more services” link on your App Dashboard to install the Wave Preview. Then get Waving!

Don’t forget to Wave @ me.

A few weeks ago, I noticed a new feature of Google Wave that allowed a user to easily send websites and content to a new wave to easily share with others. The feature (called “Wave This”) was not officially announced at the time, and I was asked politely not to say anything more at the time until the team could officially announce it.

In addition to this, the Wave This function has an official Chrome Extension. Install the extension, and you can send any page to Wave with a click!

Finally, you can also use an undocumented Wave This feature to add a Wave contact button to your sites. At the top of my page I’ve added a “Wave @ me!” button that starts a new wave with me as a participant so you can easily contact me in Google Wave. To add the button to your own site it’s as easy as filling your details in the code below:

<a href="https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=Contact+via+[Your-Site-Name]&r=[fill-in-your-@-wave-address-here]" title="Contact me in Google Wave" class="vt-p">

The &r parameter for adding a recipient isn’t listed on the API page and support might be pulled or altered so use at your own risk. Additionally, be aware that the Wave This function currently defaults to the Google Wave Preview account only, so if you use a different client (a Google Wave for Domain Apps account for instance, or Novell Pulse) you’re out of luck for now.

So there you have it! A new API, an awesome function, and my modest widget. Have at it! Make some buttons Start spreading Wave!

Something that’s been bugging me about the Google Wave interface are the icons that show you three participants from each wave in your inbox (and other searches). The origins of the feature make sense - in email we’re used to seeing who an email is from right from our inbox. In one and two person waves it does kind of make sense, but when you have multiple participants the icons stop being useful and just become clutter. To me it adds nothing to my ability to identify a wave and just makes my inbox “noisy”. The icons in the wave make sense, but I’d like a more thought out approach to identifying waves. Something like:

• Make waves I’ve started a slightly different colour (like sites where the author’s comments are shaded slightly blue).
• Don’t show icons at all in the inbox/searches (or make it easy to show and hide).
• Let me tag or bookmark specific blips within waves and make it obvious from the inbox which waves have “starred blips”.

Now this post wasn’t started just as a gripe against something I’d like to see changed - I’d like to hear what things you’d change about wave if you could. I’m not necessarily talking features we know might come (like the recently switched on “Remove” button). I mean interface and behaviour changes that don’t make sense to you, or made sense at first, but don’t now you’ve used it a bit. What are your specific gripes and revolutionary ideas that would make using Wave more of a delight for you?

Wave is constantly in a state of flux, so there’s every chance the feature you hate might be altered in future. So get your pet peeves out here in the comments or on this post’s sister wave (embedded)

[wave id=“googlewave.com!w%252BPia29cqgA”]

The most long-awaited feature (besides the seemingly dead “Draft” button) has finally been imlemented by the Google Wave team. That’s right, Remove Participant is here! What this means if you’re not an addicted Wave user, is that wave authors now have total control over who comes and goes from their waves.

This is a big deal for Google Wave. The button has been there since the beginning, but grayed out and unusable. It’s taken some of the shine off Wave that until today you were unable to recall waves or remove people added accidentally.

It works in a pretty straight forward way. You decide someone should not be a participant any more and you click remove. The person who is removed sees a big red X on the wave in their inbox and opening the wave shows the last thing they were able to see before you removed them. If you remove them before they even open the wave, they won’t even know it existed!

Part of me balks at the idea of removing waves right out from under their noses if they haven’t opened them. It feels somewhat dishonest - but it’s actually just fixing a email shortcoming! I think we’ve gotten so used to the idea that once something is sent, it can’t be unsent that it feels a bit weird to actually be able to do it again. Keep in mind though that this probably isn’t foolproof. If for example someone’s waves become “unsynchronised” while you are removing them from the wave, they might still see it - leaving you thinking that you got to it in time.

Another big issue in the months since launch has been Wave abuse. Waves have been destroyed by malicious (and accidental) addition of bots, or overwhelming the wave with large amounts of spammy text. At the moment, the best way to deal with this has been to reduce the abuser’s participation to “Read-Only” and report them to the abuse team. This remains the best way to halt an ongoing attack, but now it’s also possible to clean up after an abuser by removing the sign they were ever there in the first place.

When I started First Waves I wanted to keep my readers up to date with Google Wave news and keep on top of changes and updates as they happen. However, looking around the net I soon found many sites that already do a great job of keeping up with Wave news, and I hate the idea of rehashing the same stuff my readers could get at any number of excellent sites. So instead I have started to concentrate on larger news and “future direction” stuff here at First Waves, and I hope my readers are OK with the focus.

But I realise that many people do want up-to-the minute Wave information, so I’m going to lay out the sites and people I follow, and if you’re a hardcore Wave nut, you might like to follow them too. These people all have my utmost respect and admiration for their writing and dedication to Wave. I’ve included these sites in a Google Reader bundle called Best Google Wave Sites. If you trust my judgement, you can use the bundle to subscribe to all twenty-two feeds in just a couple of clicks! If you’d like to know more about the sites though, read on!

Wave Users - Hints and Tips

First and foremost, you cannot go past the Official Google Wave Blog - written by Googlers with news information and tips. If you only subscribe to one other site (ahem), this should be it. It’s kind of a no-brainer though so lets move on to some less obvious sites.

The Shiny Wave by David Cook takes a look at useful waves, gadgets and bots as well as the latest important technological developments that could impact Google Wave. Once a month he profiles the work of a talented Wave developer, and generally keeps a close eye on the Wave development community.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave Alright, this isn’t a site to follow so much as a book, but it’s written by the enormously talented Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. The site includes the entire book for you to read for free, or you can get it in PDF or full colour print versions for a very small fee. If you’re just getting started in Google Wave, there really is no other site you need to get your head around it.

Google Wave Information by Pooja Srinivas (a Googler) is a compilation of Wave guides Pooja has written. The focus is on brand new users who might find something like the Complete Guide (above) too complicated. It also covers some unusual and fun use cases for Wave.

Waving At You by Russell Tripp is where Russell puts all his tips and information on Google Wave to “ease the learning curve” as he puts it. Waving At You and Russell’s Twitter account are where I found a lot of my favourite Wave resources. His tips are simple, but always excellent.

Waverz uses waves themselves to create the articles. Using the wavearchive@appspot.com bot, an archived html copy of a wave is made (at http://archive.waverz.com). You can then embed this archive in a page using some simple javascript (or php or python on the back end). Beyond this technical marvel though is an insightful site written by a number of Wavers including one of my fave wavers Jon Blossom and Dragon Silicon, who’s work I’ve only just discovered while writing this article.

Google Wave Possibilities by Tim Brown is another excellent source of Wave news. Tim is a “Wave Watcher”

• a group of Wave helpers - and for good reason. His site is full of helpful information (like how to get started with particular bots), and Google Wave news.

Wave on Business is focussed on how businesses might use Google Wave. The site incorporates presentations, use case scenarios and information on collaboration.

Google Wave Book by Andrés Ferraté is a companion site to the books Getting Started with Google Wave and Google Wave: Up and Running. It is more than just a catalogue for the books though, and contains insightful posts with tips and ideas.

Riding the Wave by Prasun Nair has Wave news, but mixes in some news about other communications technology such as telephones. The posts cover Wave news and information on its future direction.

Google Wave Info. The latest news and information about Google Wave by an anonymous author. Some useful information.

Wave Developers

These sites are run by Wave developers for Wave developers and contain a mix of the technical and informative. If you would like to dive in to the nuts and bolts of Google Wave, these are a few of the best!

The Google Wave Developer Blog is the official blog for Google Wave developers. It’s full of tips and guides and helpful information for developers who are just starting out with Wave and for Wave gurus too.

Google Wave Samples Gallery is the go-to place for new robots and gadgets as they come out. Primarily a teaching resource, the extensions here are tagged with how well they will teach you the concepts behind developing for Google Wave. An excellent source of useful bots too!

On Top of the Wave by Kiwibcn is a site run by a team of developers to showcase their experiences developing for Google Wave. One of their most popular posts is how to Develop your first wave robot in Java and clearly demonstrates their knowledge and their ability to teach.

Wave.to by @waveDOTto is the home of the developers of the excellent Mr-Ray extension, plus many more. These guys clearly know their stuff, and they are passionate about sharing it with the developer community and the public.

With Waves are a team of four developers who have created a number of popular extensions including Amazon and eBay bots that insert product listings into waves when you mention them. They have also released their Extension Generator that they use internally to build their own robots. That’s generous!

Mastering Wave by Daniel Graversen follows the process of developing for Google Wave, as well as highlighting important Wave news and tips. This site is one of the first Wave sites I subscribed to.

Process Wave is written by seven software engineering students, and follows their process of developing from Invity, a group management bot, to a collaborative modelling tool integrating the open source ORYX software into Wave.

Go Wave hasn’t been updated for little while now, but has some good information about Robots, Gadgets and Embedding.

Google Wave Sites by Region

The following Wave sites are written for specific communities and are often in another language. This should not be a problem. I speak nothing but English, but thanks to modern internet translation software have no trouble reading and participating in these sites. If you subscribe to these sites in Google Reader you can use the built in translation function and you should have no troubles whatsoever.

Spanish

WAVEsfera by David Alviz. David was an enthusiastic commenter here on First Waves, so I followed him back to WAVEsfera and discovered his site was in Spanish. Realising I was missing out on some excellent tutorials and news I subscribed as soon as I remembered that Google Reader does instant translation! I’m glad I did

• David updates almost twice daily (!) and is an endless font of knowledge and excitement over Wave. Without David, I’d probably be missing out on all the other excellent non-English wave resources below.

German

Google Wave Surfer by Thomas Friebel has news and information with particular focus on the Wave experience and how it is changing over time. The site also includes a forum for users to share their wave experiences.

Wave Inside by Sascha Ahlers has shorter updates than Google Wave Surfer, but they are no less informative. A good resource for quick news.

French

Google Wave France is maintained by three authors who explore Wave use cases and report updates and changes as they happen.

Russian

Google Wave Russia by Vadim Barsukov has some in-depth articles from Q&A sessions with Lars “Google Wave” Rassmussen. Some of the content appears to be English articles translated to Russian, but there is some original content too.

Everything else

Of course, this list is not meant to be complete. There are authors I’ve not met, site’s I’ve not found and tweets I’ve not seen. There are sites like Smarterware or Read Write Web that often cover Wave news, but aren’t dedicated to covering Wave. As I come across articles like this, I’ll add them to my “Further Wave Reading” list over on the left. I also re-tweet interesting Wave articles from @firstwaves on Twitter. If you really want to be in the loop, follow my Twitter list of Wave Geniuses too!

I’ve also left off a lot of good resources and people that can be found on Google Wave itself, as that will take another post entirely. <a href=“https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=Contact+from+First+Waves&r=nunn.joshua@googlewave.com” title=“Contact Josh via Google Wave”>Ping me if you’d like to chat, and I’m sure I can help you find some great people, and useful resources.

If you know of some great Google Wave resources I haven’t covered, please let me know in the comments below!

I was visiting Pamela Fox’s personal website, and noticed she had a _Wave This I can’t find mention of the feature anywhere, and I’m not sure if it’s permanent, but a specially formatted URL takes a title argument, a content argument and passes it to a special new wavethis function as shown:

[snippet id=“843”]

Using a bit of PHP in Wordpress and a plugin called Samsarin PHP Widget (that allows php in a special widget) I created the _Wave This

The PHP I used was as follows:

[snippet id=“842”]

Simply install and activate the plug-in. Add the Samsarin widget to your sidebar and past the code in as you see it. It will only appear on post pages (not the front page).

I created a couple of button images you can feel free to use:

So that’s the new Wave This! button. Go ahead and give it a try. If you’re a developer I’d be interested in seeing other ways to implement this.

I had my first taste of international communication today thanks to Google Wave. David Alviz runs an excellent Spanish Google Wave site called WAVEsfera. He keeps up with the latest bots and gadgets, and writes very well. A while ago it might have been a small problem that his site is entirely in Spanish. Translation has been around for a while on the web now, but it involved taking note of the site and plugging it into Babelfish or something similar. Now I have translation built right into Chrome. when I visit WAVEsfera, it asks if I want it automatically translated. Similarly, I’ve subscribed to the site in Google Reader, and it translates the site for me too! So far so good, no reason not to subscribe to international sites any more!

Then I got to thinking. I’m getting in touch with some of the people who have read First Waves, and realised that it’s the perfect chance to try Aunt-Rosie, one of the original bots released with Wave. So I fired up a wave and added WAVEsfera and the translation bot. I selected the destination language and started typing.

It was true magic.

My amazement at watching my words translated as I type is like that of a caveman witnessing fire. the experience is so novel and potentially life changing. Imagine a world where language is no longer a barrier for communicating with anyone. Think of the potential for learning!

I’m full of excitement for the world of tomorrow enabled by real-time communication and translation. We’re so close to realising the universal translator of Star Trek that I can almost taste it.

In a site note: Inspired by my discoveries, I’ve enabled instant translation to each of my posts. I know I’ve had visitors from Germany, Ireland, the USA, France, Spain, the Czech Republic and Turkey just today! If you want to read First Waves in your language, check out the “[Translate]” button beneath each post. If you’re an international reader, I’d love to hear from you! Please leave a comment, or wave me at nunn.joshua@googlewave.com and don’t forget to add aunt-rosie@appspot.com!

Edited image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/ / CC BY 2.0

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 honour of a couple of Wave extensions that allow wave-to-email collaboration, I thought I’d try something light-hearted instead of my usual wordy post. Mr-Ray is a bot/gadget combo from wave.to, that lets you add people to a wave by their email address, and they get sent a stripped back version of the wave that they can use to collaborate with you, without having to figure out and navigate the full-blown Wave interface. Embedded below is an example of the interface the email user sees. Please note, this isn’t the way the developers recommend using Mr-Ray - the address should be kept secret to avoid people posing as you. In this case, I KNOW it’s not me!

I’ve got a short holiday thanks to Easter, so I’ll leave this up until Wednesday to get to know my readers and give the non-wavers a chance to see a little bit how it works. I’ll check back regularly to reply so you come back too! If you’re already on wave and want to reply as you, contact me at nunn.joshua@googlewave.com and I’ll add you directly.

[ This used to be an embedded view of a Wave. Technology comes and goes and we lose even the archives of what we had. ]
Fullscreen Version

Updated: Added static view of the wave for reference.

I love the potential of Google Wave, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sometimes frustrated with it. Here’s my list of stuff I’d like to see sooner rather than later.

1. A way to “subscribe” to people/searches: Lisa Miller writes Our Patch (the First Wavezine) on Google Wave [<a href=“https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=wave&passive=true&nui=1&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F%3Fpli%3D1&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F%3Fpli%3D1&ltmpl=standard”>“our patch” wave search]. John Blossom write useful waves about Wave [<a href=“https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=wave&passive=true&nui=1&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F%3Fpli%3D1&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F%3Fpli%3D1&ltmpl=standard”>wave search for John Blossom]. I’d like to “subscribe” to these searches and have them tell me when new items are published by these people. The presence of “archive” and “mark as read” options when you make a search suggests it should eventually tell you when the search has updated, but it’s not implemented yet. Instead, users are making their own indexes (for example -<a href=“https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=wave&passive=true&nui=1&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F&ltmpl=standard”> Our Patch)
   And while we’re on searches - a “quick add” option to turn a search into a shortcut.

2. Spam and abuse management: Spam and destruction seem out of control sometimes on wave. We know the team are building spam and user management, but it’s a bit slow going at the moment.

3. Federation: At time of writing, federation (connecting one Wave server to another) is only supported in the developer sandbox and not in the public wave preview. It’d be nice to know that when Novell Pulse is released, they’ll both talk from day one.

4. Moderation tools: Creators should have the choice to lock their initial blip from editing if that is what they desire. Some blips are purely informative and don’t need to be edited by all and sundry. This is perhaps antithetical to the way the creators intended Wave to be used, but users will do as they want with a tool, and it’s up to developers to support them.

5. Google Apps support for all users: I don’t like using nunn.joshua@googlewave.com. I’d much rather use my domain email as I have with email for the last 5 years.

6. Better contact management: Currently contacts appear in Google Contacts under their Google email addresses. Why not add their names automatically, put them in a “Wave” group, and add a link to their home page pulled from their Google Profile (and don’t try to tell me Google doesn’t know that much about them…)

So that’s my list of “missing features” that are necessary ASAP. What do you think Wave is missing right now?

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/ilovememphis/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

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.

It’s Slow

Why it’s bad:

When you send a message to someone, you hope they’ll get it before you need a response, so savvy users know to pick up the phone if they need an answer quickly. In some cases you might have IM available, but what if you need to send a document? You’d check that they’re on in IM then switch to email when they respond. How convoluted is that? Or worse, you call them and ask if you can send them a document. Not very efficient is it?

How Wave can help:

Wave tells you when a user in your contacts is online. You can “ping” them to ask if they can chat, then send them the document all from the one interface. Then you can get feedback in real-time

It’s Wasteful

Why it’s bad:

Email creates a message and sends a copy to the recipient. Then they reply, and the sender replies back and so on and so forth until there are multiple copies of the message, often with earlier messages still attached taking up space and using resources. When Aunt Helga sends her holiday snaps to everyone in her address book, every photo gets stored on every mail server that receives it, accumulating gigabytes of data all around the world in mail servers.

How Wave can help:

The Federation protocol requires the originator to “host” the message for the rest of the recipients. So when Aunt Helga sends a Wave full of pictures, the message is accessed right from her own provider, so it’s only stored once. This multiplies a bit when other Wave providers are involved, but not as much as the potential email has for wasting space.

It’s Difficult to Follow

Why it’s bad:

Imagine our mythical Aunt Helga again if you will. She’s planning a trip to France with her daughter Julia, so they email their ideas back and forth about the sites they might see when they get there and who they might sponge off. After about 10 emails, Helga wants to make a list of all these places, but has to wade back through them all to find each mention of a place-name. How inefficient! Tragically she misses a couple because she doesn’t recognise the names. Then Julia asks if she can bring her friend Tracy and they have to start all over again to make sure they cover the places Tracy wants to visit too! Not to mention the new conversations they must start with their French relatives to ask for a place to stay and to find the best sights to see while they are there.

How Wave can help:

Helga starts a wave and adds Julia. When Julia asks where they’ll go, they begin a blip right there to brainstorm ideas, while they discuss other aspects of the trip further down the wave. When Julia realises she wants Tracy to come she adds her directly, and Tracy can see exactly what they’ve come up with so far, and can even play back the wave to follow the discussion. She can also edit the “places to see” blip to add her own ideas. Finally, once Helga has contacted the French relatives separately to ask them nicely if the three can stay with them, she adds them to the ongoing wave to give suggestions and ideas right there in that same blip!

It’s Full of Spam

Why it’s bad:

Do I need to answer this? The problem with email is that anyone with your address can send you something. Of course, this has allowed email to grow into the juggernaut it is, because it’s just so damn easy to send information to people. However it means that anyone with your address can send you any old rubbish, and (at least before today’s exceptional spam filtering) it will pop up right in your inbox with all your legitimate mail.

How Wave can help:

Google Wave also has a spam and abuse problem at the moment. However I believe there are a number of ways Wave could begin to tackle spam, which warranted another post.

It’s Insecure

Why it’s bad:

As touched on in the Spam section above, email is trivial to spoof. Anyone can send email as anyone else. Some email providers offer some protection against this, but like almost every modern feature of email this was an added afterthought, and can not be presumed of every email client and system. Additionally, you might log in securely (using an https:// address) to your email, but unless you go out of your way to enable it your mail is generally not sent and stored securely. Email providers do what they can to secure it, but insecurity is built in!

How Wave can help:

We’ve already seen that waves are tied to the originating Wave providers, preventing spoofing. As an intrinsic part of this security, all wave communication is encrypted from end to end, meaning someone watching the data being sent between wave clients will not see anything useful.

It’s Limiting

Why it’s bad:

With the technology of the internet getting faster, smarter and more secure, people are finding new and unique ways to use it. It’s common to have two, three or more places where we must go to check for news and messages. Numerous attempts have been made to unify these streams of data into one super-inbox, but none have really caught on.
Email is still the dominant form of messaging, and most new services end up providing some sort of email gateway to their service. For instance, Facebook users can now reply to messages and posts via their email, and third parties let you follow and reply to Twitter users through your email. These solutions are usually tacked on as an afterthought. Email was not intended for many of the roles we shoehorn it into.

How Wave can help:

Wave is being built from the ground up to be customisable and extensible. The Wave API allows for the creation of Robots and Gadgets that each have a defined role in customising a user’s wave experience. Robots can be used to change the behaviour of waves (by importing Twitter notifications for instance). Gadgets can enhance the interface to add tools and options not available before (a voting gadget or similar). I can imagine eventually plugging in the sites and notifications I want using my choice of Bots and Gadgets. Such options are only limited by the imagination of developers.

These and more are the reason I’m excited about the future of Google Wave and the Wave Protocol. I can’t wait for the day I’m using Google Wave or something like it instead of my clunky antiquated email system.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/lovati/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

The Wave team have said very little about how they will address the spam problem, but from some clues and hints in the interface and what they have said, I can take a couple of guesses about how they could start to tackle it.

1. First up, Wave will ensure messages are signed and verified from the source. Currently email can be forged and made to look like a legitimate email coming from a trusted source. The Wave Protocol specifically addresses this, making it impossible for anyone to “spoof” another address without access to that user’s account.

2. Email currently makes it very easy to send millions of messages with little to no cost involved for the sender - they send and delete and don’t need to save copies of them, and the recipient is forced to deal with the accumulated data. The Wave Protocol however, requires the sender to host the wave and keep a copy for future reference. Spammers will no doubt find ways to send and then remove their waves, but if a host no longer hosts the wave, that could be a reliable indication that the sender was a spammer.

3. Finally, the few times the developers have been asked about spam they’ve mentioned a possible white-list system. White-listing involves choosing who can send you messages and blocking everyone else. People worry that this will stop legitimate communication, say from long lost friends, getting through. But already built into the interface is a “Requests” link that Wave says are “Waves for users not in your contacts list”. This could allow anyone to contact you, but you’d know at a glance that they weren’t from people you knew and trusted, and could more easily add them to your contacts, or mark them as spam.

I believe a combination of these three factors will go some way to addressing the spam problem. By tying everyone to a Wave server it’s not as economical to spam using waves. By not allowing completely anonymous communication, reported spammers can be more easily shut down, and by white-listing users we can identify potential spam at a snap. The Wave team will hopefully come up with even more solutions to implement and I’ll be interested to see how it develops.

In a short and succinct tweet by Joakim Nejdeby, we finally have news of Google Wave in an Apps environment. With almost little to no fanfare.

Google Wave activated for our students, http://wave.student.liu.se #googlewave #Google #GoogleApps #liu

Joakim Nejdeby on Twitter.

Joakim Nejdeby is the CIO of Linköping University, a large University in Sweden with some twenty-five thousand students. In an email exchange with Mr Nejdeby, I clarified some of the details of the roll-out. I asked if this was an official partnership with Google and if we could expect an announcement from them. He replied:

From what I understand this is a preview activated for a few customers using Google Apps. I expect the twitter and Facebook announcement [from Nejdeby himself] was the official announcement. We will likely add information on our student pages as well.

Email exchange with Joakim Nejdeby

Asked whether the student accounts were compatible with the current public Wave infrastructure, or if they were limited to sending waves withing their own domain Nejdeby replied:

I have not seen any observable difference between the regular Wave system and our preview. From what I can see there are no limitations in interactions between our users and the public system.

Email exchange with Joakim Nejdeby

I’ve asked to connect with Mr Nejdeby (a fan of Google Wave from day one) on Wave to see how well the two systems interoperate. If it does indeed work as well as Nejdeby says, then this (to my knowledge) will be the first large scale public roll-out of Google Wave outside of the Google Public Preview opened last September. Linköping University has activated Google Wave on their domain for 31858 users and reports that they currently have close to seventeen thousand active Apps users. How many active Wave users this will translate to remains to be seen.

It may be by releasing Wave in contained environments such as universities, Google hopes to continue testing and expanding in an environment that is more receptive to the collaborative nature of Wave. One of the complaints leveled at Wave has been that people fail to see the need for another communication medium in their daily workflow. As a new technology without widespread use, it’s difficult to use on a daily basis as a user’s main means of communication. Perhaps with large businesses and education institutions on board Wave might see increased uptake as people learn how simple it can make internal collaboration. We may even see these large organisations driving a push to activate Wave for other companies and institutions as they get used to using them amongst themselves.

It should be noted that this opening up is not quite the announcement of full-scale federation that some Wave developers and users are hoping for. The Apps infrastructure is run by Google and managed by the individual organisations, so can more easily integrate with the public Google Wave service. Hopefully though, as Google Wave grows in popularity with education and business it will spur development of competing products on top of the Wave Protocol.

Update: I apparently missed that Google said they were making Wave available to select institutions “this fall“, 2009 soon after Wave was opened to the public.

Image by Joakim Nejdeby

When I was in grade 8 I learnt French. I say learn, but it was a handful of disconnected words and maybe a sentence or two that I couldn’t possibly remember now. The problem for me was that I knew I was going about learning it the wrong way, but relied on the teacher to teach me the “best way”. See, when I wanted to say a word in French, I first had to think of the word in English, then check my mental filing system for the equivalent word in French. It’s a slow and cumbersome way of recall that never really worked for me, no matter how many times we repeated the words by rote.

I’m not bringing it up now to point out the flaws in my year 8 education, but to highlight something about the way people learn. When Wave was first announced and launched it was described by various people as “sort of like email” or “part instant messenger, part Google Docs”. This is because we often find it easier to understand something new when we “pin” it on a concept we already know and understand. Likening one thing to something else is sort of like my metal filing cabinet I had in 8th grade, useful up to a point, but no way to go about using something on an advanced day-to-day basis.

Which is why I think Google or a third party need to seriously consider how the non-tech-minded are going to learn how to use Wave.

The problem as I see it is how the tech-illiterate are going to learn how to use Wave. I work in an industry where technology is secondary to the primary business, and am constantly amazed to find that there are still people who can’t use email and often even refuse to turn on a computer. It’s sometimes my job to explain even the most rudimentary of modern communication tasks. I might normally do this by comparing email to snail-mail, email addresses to post office boxes and so on. The user then keeps these analogies in mind the next time they use their email without me around.

With Wave, the analogies are all different. There aren’t yet clear real-world examples we can use to explain Wave concepts and so far all the analogies I’ve heard compare it to other technology concepts. For example, a wave is compared to a message board and individual blips are like single emails. While somewhat helpful for technology types, these analogies will fail with non-techies who are already struggling to map these concepts to the “real-world”. I suspect the thought-process to interpret these concepts might take two or three steps to “translate” these new ideas into ones the user is familiar with. So we have Mr Jones who has been told that a wave is like an email, which he remembers from his grandson is like a letter. But He’s also been told it can be used instantly like a telephone. Technically (and very loosely) these analogies are correct, but are they useful?

Perhaps this is exactly the reason the Wave team abandoned terms like “message” and “update” for brand new ones like “wave” and “blip” - to give everyone a level playing field when learning the new technology. I just can’t help wondering however if new names and ideas might be more confusing.

What I’d like to see is a third party developer build a wave solution (server and client) that addresses the new concepts in an involving and intuitive way. It’s widely known that Google builds software the engineering way - by doing it the simplest way they know how, then testing multiple variations over and over and continually refining. This incremental approach can only work when it’s almost there to begin with. The huge shift in thinking that Wave requires might never make sense to the non-technical when built by engineers. Another party however may be able to research the best way to school new users in Wave right in the interface.

A radically different wave-compatible alternative could open Wave up to a whole new set of users that might otherwise pass it over as “too technical”. If Google want to encourage the world to embrace Wave and abandon email, they will need all the help they can get building a translation-free wave experience for new users.

• Do you find Wave confusing?
• What do you think your less tech-savvy friends and family might think of Wave the first time they see it?
• How would you make Wave more new-user-friendly?

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/hectorl/ / CC BY-ND 2.0