Get Your Wave Peeves Off Your Chest!

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”]

Lars Rasmussen talks to CNET UK

But it’s not going to happen overnight. It will be five years before we can say “this actually works.”

Lars Rasmussen on Google Wave via CNET UK.

Told you so

8 Google Wave Competitors

Introduction

A photograph of a mural depicting a cute cartoon turtle riding a surfboard on a big wave

by The Ultimate Wave Adventure by JEFFREY'S MURALS

Google Wave is a product that’s trying to do something massive to the way we communicate online. Its stated goal is to be what email might look like if it were invented today. A number of other services are labeled as competitors to Google Wave, including the recently updated Google Docs (which is too new for me to comment on in this article), but I wanted to take a look at which of these services are real competition. Below are the services who show the most promise at becoming the next generation of online communication.

Microsoft Sharepoint

Microsoft Sharepoint is a suite of content management tools to maintain and collaborate on documents. While it was never sold as a replacement to email, it was held up as one of the products Google Wave was meant to compete against. But as Steve Gaitten of Bamboo Nation points out, Wave competes with Outlook, not Sharepoint.

It might be possible for Microsoft to transform Outlook in some significant way that expands it beyond email into some sort of super email client. It might even integrate it into Sharepoint a lot further. The truth is, email is Google Wave’s biggest competition. It might be outdated and rough, but it’s the most popular form of communication on the internet. If anything stands a chance at beating Wave, it’s the service that Wave is trying to beat. If email innovation can keep up with user demand, it might just remain the top dog for another 40 years. If Outlook can maintain the large slice of the pie it has, while innovating on top of email it could still be competing into the future.

Novell Pulse

This is exactly the kind of “competition” Google was hoping for when they built Wave. As I’ve said before, Wave’s only hope of replacing email is federation. Only by giving users the choice of Wave provider will users find one that works for them. Novell Pulse might even become a more loved Wave client, and I think that would actually make Google happy. Personally, I’m eagerly awaiting a Pulse preview account.

SAP Streamwork

This tool was touted as a Google Wave competitor while in Beta (with the code name 12Sprints or Constellation).

The tool turns out to be a collaboration space for making decisions. It’s not a complete replacement for email, but I’m not sure that was ever their intention. Streamwork allows a team to collaborate and add gadgets to enhance the process.

“It was clear we needed to work together,” Meyer said. “We’re excited about what they’re doing, they’re excited about what we’re doing.” Users will be able to share content between the two platforms, he said. - David Meyer, reported by Computer World

It will be interesting to see what sort of integration they build into it.

Shareflow and Toqbox

Much like Streamwork, these tools are not marketed as email replacements, but were both touted as Google Wave competitors. What they do is allow users to collaborate on documents in real-time. If these sorts of services were better integrated into email (perhaps using GMail’s new oAuth tools) they might be more likely candidates. Otherwise they are really only competing with Google Docs and others of that kind.

ccBetty, Syphir, Etacts, Xobni, Rapportive et al.

Products such as ccBetty and the others mentioned enhance email. They exist to remove the holes in email by providing additional information, embedded media, faster searching, or simplified discussion. Some work on GMail, others on Outlook, others work outside any email service by CC-ing a special address onto each email you wish to turn into a discussion. The problem with all of these tools as competition for Wave is that the email protocol just doesn’t take these sorts of tools into consideration, so they’re limited by how many services the developers can write for. That is, each service might support Outlook or GMail, but not all the other smaller players in the marketplace. Where Google Wave has this model beat is by including extension support from day one, allowing developers to enhance Wave in whatever ways they can imagine. Any service that federates with Google Wave will also support these extensions, making it a truly open, extensible experience.

EtherPad

This collaboration tool gets its own special crossed out spot because it was one of the strongest, simplest competitors in the collaboration space, but was bought by Google! The developers have obviously since been put to work on Google Docs, as evidenced by the announcement of the recent update.

Facebook.

This one scares me a little. In some ways, Google Wave is the anti-Facebook. Where Wave is built on open technology, uses an open protocol and federates with other services, Facebook is a “walled garden” and keeps users inside their service. Both systems let developers make extensions and apps that use the platform, and Facebook seems to be slowly inching towards including some of the collaboration features that have been missing so far. Facebook has a huge user base, and could easily become some sort of defacto go-to communication platform for the masses. Currently though there are no obvious moves to open up the platform further, making it unlikely to catch on in business, where email still rules.

Twitter (+ Buzz and other Social Public Messaging)

Currently, none of the services in their current form pose a threat to email - they’re too limited with their 140 character limits and lack of in-line collaboration. But Twitter (or a more open version of it at least) is the product I think has the most real chance of beating Google Wave at becoming the communication platform of the future.

A distributed network (integrated with Twitter of course) that updates in real-time, with an API could have many people needing their email less and less. Once you can get updates from your favourite companies and all your friends are on the service, why would you need it? Throw in an extension or two, enhanced private messaging, and you have a very compelling product that could steal users away from email. The platform is so new, no one really knows where it could go in the future, and I suspect it will give Google Wave and traditional email a run for their money. It could be Twitter, or Buzz, Status.Net or a new player we’ve never heard of, but the idea has the strongest traction of any I’ve seen.

Something completely new

So those are my thoughts about Google Wave’s true competition. Of course, a company could come out of the blue with a product so completely new and exciting it amasses a huge audience that completely abandons email. This is the least likely of all I think, as I’ve stated before I think Wave is our best chance at replacing email wholesale. Alternatively, email will be killed by slow changes to the next generation of social communication. The chances of it happening are dependant on the whims of companies who are trying to make a buck, not replace email so I’m not holding my breath. Email will be replaced by something federated, open, extensible and easy to use. I’ve taken my best shot at predicting what it could be.

What are your thoughts? Is Google Wave our best hope, or is there something even more obvious that could take email’s place?

Six Things Wave Needs Soon

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…)

Coming
        Soon!

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

A quote from Novell: Demonstrating Inter-company Collaboration

The Google Wave Federation Protocol excited us, because for the first time since email, it provided a way for collaboration systems to cooperate in a non silo’d way . The promise is that each organization can choose what product to use and the communication will flow unimpeded between the different systems, in the same way that people on different email systems can send and receive messages to each other today. This is a collaboration revolution we wanted to be a part of. - “Novell Pulse and Google Wave“ - Google Wave Developer Blog.

This is exciting. More detail up soon.

Google Wave Available to 31000 University Students

liu.gif

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

GA with Wave
        active.png

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

Wave on Slow Cook

I get the feeling talking to regular web-folk that Google Wave was a huge disappointment for them. With the introduction of Buzz, comments and posts flew asking “will this be better than that Google Wave failure?”

crock
        pot

It’s taken me this long to figure out that people are not viewing Google Wave the way I do. The current technology life cycle goes something like this:

  1. Readers are on the lookout for new products to try, and better yet - beta invites to get early exclusive access to the next big thing.

  2. They try the site, decide if it fits in with their day-to-day activities and if it gives them any benefit over the last shiny new thing they tried.

  3. They talk it up to their friends to get them to join, as these sites are almost always no fun without a large number of people you know and respect.

Then the cycle repeats for all manner of sites and services.

I do this. Every day I pop open Techcrunch, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, Web Worker Daily and others to keep informed of the latest hot places I can claim my name on. I’ve joined Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Plurk, and others too numerous to mention all vying to be the place I share my daily activities. It’s almost addictive to keep on top of the latest sites.

I’m guessing a lot of the people who were itching for Wave invites were, like I normally would be, expecting Google Wave to deliver something to replace Facebook or Twitter or Google Docs, or whatever they got in their heads it would be amazing for. It’s unsurprising that people want to use the best tools they can for their work (and leisure). The problem was that Google Wave was never meant to be a replacement for any of these things. It wasn’t even meant to be a replacement for email - not just yet anyway.

The best post about this topic came from Daniel Tenner. What problems does Google Wave solve? came out soon after Wave debuted and attempted to explain this disconnect between what people were expecting and what was actually delivered. It’s an excellent read, and vital to the understanding of what Google Wave is meant to be. The short version is: Google is building something that might be our preferred platform for communication some time in the future. They’re not expecting it to be an overnight sensation, they just want people to be aware of it, and start thinking how they can use it to phase out busted email technology.

At the recent SXSW conference, Louis Gray reported on talks by the GMail team:

Google Wave, which debuted in early beta last year, is a “leapfrog project”, which goes beyond today’s environment, but is set to impact a future Web.

Gmail Failures, Crazy Ideas and Wave’s Leapfrog.

The important thing to keep in your mind here is that Google Wave will only succeed (over time) if they have a large collection of useful add ons and competing alternative services that interoperate. They’re attempting to oust a 30-year-old technology that has morphed and grown and matured and become one of the vital technologies of the web today. Everyone uses it, and it’s been shoehorned into all sorts of roles it’s unsuited for. Google knows that replacing it will not be easy, and they don’t expect it will happen quickly. They do know it will take a lot of work from 3rd party developers to give it even a fraction of the rich ecosystem that email has. So they want to get it right.

So next time you log in to Wave keep that in mind. And if you’re a developer, give it another shot. You’re our best hope of retiring email from our lives and giving us real, exciting and useful new technology as the most ubiquitous communication tool we have.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/geishabot/ / CC BY 2.0

Google Wave Gets Email Notifications

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

In the Google Wave Blog Ged goes on to say:

If you want to use Google Wave with your friends, family or colleagues who aren’t logging in frequently, help them to turn on notifications. Then, they can get updates on their Google Wave account, even if they mainly stick to checking their email inbox.

Ged Ellis, Software engineer, Google Wave Team

Perhaps this feature was always on the cards, or maybe it was a reaction to the <a href=“http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=google+wave+fail”>waning interest in Wave from the geek community. By making it easier to get notifications people might start inviting friends who might otherwise be uninterested in another tool to check. I know I’ll be inviting my wife and a couple of buddies that I’ve previously thought might be uninterested thanks to this addition.

However it’s still a long way from the ultimate integration I see is necessary for Wave to finally catch on - using Wave as a full email client. As long as email and waves are two separate entities in two separate products there will still be two places someone must visit to get both the old (email) and new (wave) forms of communication. Notifications via email just makes this more obvious. Ideally Wave should be usable as a hub for all sorts of communication. Currently the closest we have to this ideal is email, but it’s dependent on services sending out notifications. With Wave, the potential for any third-party to integrate services via bots and gadgets gives Wave a clear advantage.

All said though, the notifications are a welcome addition, and will make convincing friends and family to join that much easier. Time will tell if it helps Wave get the consistent user numbers it needs to take off.

Lars: Remove Participant Feature due "Within a Month"

We have begun testing remove participant internally and hopefully it will hit externally within a month

– Lars Rasmussen, one of the lead Wave developers.

In a Wave entitled “Google Wave User Black List”, Lars piped up to offer advice on the best way to avoid and take action against known trolls and abusers and offered the above titbit about the imminent release of the ability to remove participants from Wave.

This is big news for Wave, and one of the most important features noticeably missing from the Google Wave interface. Wave abuse, trolling and destruction are all unavoidable realities of using Wave at the moment, and although usually infrequent, can significantly lower the enjoyment and tone of a Wave. Unfortunately, while every one can agree that a removal tool is necessary (and there’s an unusable greyed out button to show that the Wave team think it’s important as well) it hasn’t been implemented yet. One of the reasons for this delay must be the extraordinary thought and research that must be put into such a feature, to make certain that the feature itself is not abused. Care must be taken to see that users who are added and then removed retain some control of their legitimate contributions within context. The ability to remove people from such a collaborative space is an enormous can of worms, and one that most people would agree is important enough to get right the first time.

The wave that Lars opened up on was created to list known trolls and spammers.

bq..  

  • Once you have added public with full access, making an abuse user read-only is more effective than removing them from the wave will.
  • There will soon be a way for you to report abuse directly to our internal abuse team
  • The feature you are asking for: block a user from a particular wave and all future waves created by you is exactly right but it will take us many months to get there…

– Further feedback from Lars

This is tremendous news, and along with the ability to make participants read-only, and even score them with karma //the.geekorium.au/karma-a-way-to-keep-wavers-in-line/ give users a powerful arsenal to shape the Wave experience the way they want.

Hat tip to The Shiny Wave: Google Wave User Black List.

Google Wave and University

Café Area Saltire Centre Glasgow Caledonian
        University

While attempting to complete my first group assignment as an external student at University, I realised how much harder it was than while I was an internal student.  If you’re an internal student you see each other at least once a week,  making it hard to ignore the fact you have an upcoming assignment. Also you actually get to meet and talk with people and elect  to be in their group (if the group selection process is left to the students). Being external, I had to post a random post on the discussion board and hope I was choosing the right people. And then hope they didn’t ignore my emails or wait a month or so to reply.

Google Wave would have been one of the best tools for this group assignment. Email meant a group of four people were all individually emailing each other and also at times emailing all four of the group. I ended up with snapshots of what was happening, who was having what role, and what the plan was. With Google Wave, all the communication would have been in one Wave, or even multiple, but it would have been available for the group to read and to add and edit. The plan of the assignment, of who was writing what, and how we were writing it could have been kept at the top of the wave, and edited as needed. The parts assigned to individuals could have been put in the wave and the group could know exactly where the assignment was up to, and edit other’s parts as we went.

The two main features of Google Wave which would have positive affects on a university group assignment, would have been the real time editing and the ability to highlight. Real time made it more like conversation, without having to wait for emails to be sent, or having to work out who could possible meet in the City to catch up. Highlighting would allow those edits to be prominent or for individuals to reinforce any point they needed to make.

Expectations

Set suitable expectations. Despite the months of buzz, and blogosphere- and Twitterverse-wide clamoring for Google Wave invites, the product is still in preview and has some rough edges. Therefore, it does all parties good to be realistic, even if everybody is psyched to be the first kid on their block to use it on a live project.

6 Tips For Using Google Wave On Your First Project.

This is the first of six excellent things to keep in mind when using Wave for the first time, let alone on a project. Wave is full of potential, but people seem to forget it’s still just getting off the ground.

I love that people are using it for projects already.

A Wave Extension Market Place?

“…developers have asked us a lot for a market place where we’ll help them sell their extensions to our users including a revenue share so we’ll also make some money from it. “I’ll be very surprised if we don’t go down that route.” - Google Wave to have application store | News | TechRadar UK

This will be a very important development in the success of Wave. The iPhone has grown enormously by making high quality apps simple to pay for and receive. The key difference for Wave will be that the protocol is open for anyone to extend, and the main client (the Google Wave interface) is web based.

I predict this will mean a lot more extensions will be made open source or free. Of course it’s highly dependent on the quality and user experience of the store. If a developer can make an extension open source, but still make it available in the same marketplace many will choose to do so.

Keep in mind too, that over time other clients will emerge that will access the Wave protocol, and it will be interesting to see if the marketplace will extend to such clients.

Wave and Real Time Collaboration

This in no way represents a new social networking tool, and I think using it as such would be rather cumbersome. The beauty of it is, the user can control the experience and dictate its purpose.

Google Wave Is The Future of Real Time Collaboration

What You're Missing About Google Wave

What is amazing is that Google has developed a real-time communication framework that can work in a federated environment.
People aren’t getting it right now because they’re expecting the beta to all be about polishing the User Experience. But it’s not about polishing: it’s about defining.

Macro Linz » The Point You’re Missing About Google Wave

Wave is Game Changing

A quick overview of the most mind-blowing features of Google Wave.

The Top 6 Game-Changing Features of Google Wave [Mashable]