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

3 Things you should know about Wave

I use portable Firefox for browsing at work with a modified user-agent (pretending it’s Internet Explorer, of course!) and Google Wave keeps alerting me the browser is not supported. To bypass this annoying check, go directly to https://wave.google.com/wave/?nouacheck. Of course, some browsers just can’t handle the storm: in my experience so far, Opera 10 fails to load Wave every time with a nasty error. - Fors: Shortcuts and searches in Google Wave.

gxg at FORS covers three things you should know about Wave. We’ve covered Shortcuts and useful searches already, but the information about URLs is important and useful.

One take-away from the section on searches is the reader tip published at Lifehacker about limiting waves to certain languages.

More Wave Searches

With so much happening at once in Wave it’s easy to be overwhelmed with it all. Save yourself some grief and use these handy searches to make managing the flood easier.

Three Google Wave Searches Worth Saving [Smarterware]

Lifehacker's Google Wave 101

Gina Trapani gives an overview of the things you absolutely MUST know as you dive into Google Wave

Google Wave 101 [Lifehacker]

Lijit Search: Impeccable customer service

lijit stickers://www.flickr.com/photos/stickergiant/2478273711/

Photo by teamstickergiant

I try a lot of new widgets and technologies on my blog, to see what they offer and make my website more exciting1. While I can usually appreciate what they are trying to do, I more often than not find that the increased page-load times or disparity with my blog’s look usually compel me to uninstall the thing before too long. And I’m certainly not too attached to a thing to hesitate to uninstall it if it’s messing something up, or has some sort of bug.

This post is about one such widget that’s tenaciously holding on, and the reasons I’m still using it.

The Lijit search widget is a little doohicky you can install (with code or plugin) on to a lot of popular blogging sites with minimal fuss. Like a lot of widgets, Lijit offers multiple configurations and designs and serves a single purpose. In this case, Lijit offers a sort of enhanced, social search. Using Google as a back-bone, Lijit takes over whatever boring backend search you might have and offers more relevant results (using Google’s magic sauce) with some extra special stuff thrown in. The “special stuff” is relevant links and results from any other satellite site you might like to add. For example: I post to Twitter a lot, save links on Delicious, re-share stuff from Google Reader and post photos to Flickr, amongst others. Lijit asks for all the details of the services you use and then includes results from those services as well!

But that’s not all! It also figured out who’s on my blogroll in the side bar there, and includes the people in my network on Delicious2, and can include stuff it finds from them that also might have anything to do with the search. So not only do my visitors get increasingly relevant and useful info (as there certainly isn’t any here), but my friends and associates also get some extra loving! It makes the search so much more productive than looking for keyword matches in a single site’s database.

Enough about the search though! This post was inspired more by the awesome service I have received from the Lijit people, not once, but twice now. While the search is good, I’m a fickle, fickle man and am prone to change things around here without much thought. I somehow (I can’t remember if by choice or mistake) disabled the Lijit search on my site and would probably have never put it back. Except that Jacqueline from Lijit contacted me soon after and very politely enquired if there was a reason I had disabled the product.

Normally that might trigger my stalking alarm, but I pushed my misgivings aside and came over here to turn it back on. When I did I noticed it was misbehaving a bit and told Jacqueline as much. She had someone in their support department look at it straight away and I had an answer in a matter of hours. I’ve been happy with it ever since. It provides detailed analytics of my user’s searches so I can better target what they’re looking for too.

Until yesterday, when out of the blue the plugin started adding extra buttons to the top of my site. I immediately bitched about it on Twitter, then wrote an email to Jacqueline again asking her to look into it (it’s OK, she nicely said I could at any time!). By the time I woke up today, Jaqueline had written back to say she would look into it, and another lovely person called Tara had emailed me to say she saw my complaint on Twitter and already had someone investigating. By the time I had even checked my email it had been fixed.

To me, that is exemplary. I could have used their official support channels (although surprisingly couldn’t find them – they might want to look into that), but instead in both cases took the lazy option to uninstall/bitch about it. In both cases Lijit cared enough about my experience that they’re actively monitoring for mentions of their product, and more importantly acting on them quickly to fix the problems.

So yay to the Lijit support team. I hope your product lives a long a happy life. Keep up the good work, and thank you for a fantastic service! And anyone who’s now interested in trying Lijit out, search for something in the search bar up there. And when you sign up to Lijit, add me to your Lijit network.


  1. I could probably just post more often, but it’s easier to install a widget! 

  2. and MyBlogLog, but who uses THAT any more 

Potential Google Game

Google Logo made of
        LEGO

google_logo by Gayle Laakmann McDowell.

OK, I haven’t Googled it so this game might already exist.

Two or more players - one player does a bit of research (if they need to) and declares some piece of information that the other players must find. Ideally it should be something that will only be found on one page on the net - not common info like you might find on Wikipedia, but rather some small factoid on some obscure website in the outer reaches of the internet.

Then the other players have to craft the perfect search phrase that will produce that page in the top result of a Google search - without using any of the actual words you’re searching for, or any prior knowledge of the page to your advantage. The player’s score decreases with every failed attempt to make it into the top spot.

I can’t think of anyone geeky enough to actually play this with me, so it’s purely hypothetical. And it’d probably need honing and crafting to make it playable. If you’re geeky enough you might also like Googlewhacking or you could check out this online archive of Google games.

Did you mean: aaaarrrggghhh!!!!!!!

Amusing Google ‘Did you mean’
        result

Heh.

Yay, Coolest Feeling Ever!

I got my first comment today by a non-friend non-family member. Can’t tell if it’s just spam or not though, and I’ll delete it soon (partly cause Mil’s not happy with it).

It got me checking my site statistics though, and I actually get visitors! It’s a very good feeling for someone who thought he’d never be read. Ever.

People have visited from the Dilbert Blog, where I’ve commented a couple of times, and from Quick Online Tips. Hello people from there! The bulk of my outside traffic is from search engines (Google particularly), and some pretty weird search terms.

‘Josh Nunn’ is the top Google spot, and I’m not sure who’s been looking for me that way (hello Dad?) or if they’ve been googling their own name like I do from time to time - Hello all Josh (or Joshua) Nunn’s of the world. Whoever you are leave comments, as I love knowing that I’m not the only person reading my thoughts.

This site is about tenth on Google for ‘The Streets of Ashkelon’, the short story that prompted my last entry, and a long ramble about God.

I was hit a lot by people looking for info about Google’s error message, which seems to be a bit more talked about than it was a month ago.

I also can’t spell earthquake (or eath-quake as I have spelt it in the past) and have been visited by another such spelling disabled buddy from Google.

Lastly, someone searched for ‘josh wee’.
What?
What?
Why?
Huh?

Josh Wee. A band perhaps, or a brand of deodorant? But I’m first on Google for THAT particular phrase… yay…

So that’s my day made. I feel so happy.

But please, if you’re going to proposition me, don’t do it on my publicly accessible web site.