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.

Remove: Remove Yourself! Remove Others! is a post from: The Geekorium

Another minor update (perhaps a test) — the new Extensions link has been moved down to the drop-down folder area, and been separated into Featured and All. These were previously available as searches, while the original link simply showed all extensions. This is all part of the plan to get people using and developing extensions to showcase the strengths of Google Wave.

Extension Dropdown [Interface Update] is a post from: The Geekorium

Not a big thing, but a simple update that shows the shortcut for closing a blip on the Done button. Also missing is the Draft check box which has been present from day one but never worked. This could mean that the ability to create drafts might be low on the priority list, or the team decided that it was confusing to have non-functioning interface elements available. Either way, it’s a sign that the Wave team are serious about cleaning up Wave and making it less confusing for new users.

Shortcut on Buttons [Interface Update] is a post from: The Geekorium

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.

Fullscreen Version

Updated: Added static view of the wave for reference.

It’s Easter. So Chill Out, Try Wave, Check out Mr-Ray and Say Hello! is a post from: The Geekorium

This is exciting. More detail up soon.

A quote from Novell: Demonstrating Inter-company Collaboration is a post from: The Geekorium

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

French, Postboxes and Wave is a post from: The Geekorium

Take the URL http://antimatter15.com/misc/read/? and tack on the wave ID you want to publish, and BAM! a simple published wave. For example: “Things to do in Adelaide”, a wave put together by Taryn Hicks. It’s shiny and blue, and the information is easy to read without needing a Wave account. In addition the creator has made it possible to publish a private wave, simply by adding the gwavereader@googlewave.com bot to the wave!

A tool like this should be an official feature of Google Wave. One of my biggest concerns is that as wave becomes more popular, people will begin to publish tonnes of handy information as waves only (this has already begun). The problem with the current embedding tools are that they require the reader to have a Wave account, and just as importantly a browser that can handle Wave. Sadly this is the opposite of the open and free web the founders of the Internet envisioned. But with tools like the Wave Reader, we’re on the way to getting simple, clean HTML pages of information the way we’re accustomed to. To generate some clean HTML you can use to make a totally static page out of a wave, add &html=0 to the URL.

So head over to the Art of Wave Reader to get a good idea of how to use the tool and pick up a bookmarklet that will open your current wave in Wave Reader. You can also download the code. You may notice it’s now up to version 5.2 (the blog post was about 4.6) and is a marked improvement from even a week ago, now making extensive use of HTML5 and CSS3. Wave Reader is released under a GNU General Public Licence v3.

I can’t recommend Wave Reader highly enough and wish a feature like this was baked into wave. It’s fast, good looking, and very useful.

Read a Wave in a Fast, Simple Interface is a post from: The Geekorium

Well, with the release of the Read-Only feature, you can now specify select users and groups as read-only participants, meaning they can see your waves in production, but can’t edit them themselves. Perfect for the thousands of informational waves that are available, particularly those that might not have been edited in a while but might be ripe for archiving. To make a user or group read-only, simply click on their icon and select read-only from the new drop down box.

The second feature is one of the other most requested tools — the ability to restor a wave to a former state. Those destroyed and damaged waves I mentioned? Now they have a chance of resurection, without the annoying cutting and pasting that went with the process before now. While playing back a wave, click Restore when you’re at the point before it all went pear-shaped. You won’t lose any data, as the state will be copied to the end of the playback and you can still see the changed that were made after that point.

Between these two new (some would argue vital) tools, Wave becomes more than a novel real-time experiment, and begins to take shape as the useful documenting, collaboration tool it always promised to be. Of course, there are still more changes needed before it becomes a reliable collaboration tool (revert single blips, read-only main blips with posting rights) and the team promise much more in their announcement post, but this is a terrific first step.

Restore a Wave to a former state, or make it Read-Only. is a post from: The Geekorium

It’s a simple idea: take the minimal interface and make it available (faster) on the desktop, to dash off quick messages and keep an eye on your inbox (or other important folders). Because it’s so small you can pop it into a corner of your screen and keep working. While Wave is getting its feet, it also saves you dedicating a tab to it while letting you participate and build up the community.

Unfortunately because it’s simply a view to the mobile interface it suffers one of the same beta flaws — it does not sync changes until you click “done”. So if you’re used to the behaviour of the regular wave interface, you might find it difficult switch back and forth regularly. Additionally, none of the keyboard shortcuts from the main interface work, so you need to mouse around a lot more.

If you need a simple interface to use Wave, Waver might be for you,

Waver is a simple Adobe Air app for Google Wave is a post from: The Geekorium

Additionally, the demonstrated iPhone application seems to be no different from what Google has already made possible simply by bookmarking your Wave page to the home screen.

If however you don’t wish to worry about setting something like this up yourself you may wish to give it a try.

Waveboard is free software (at time of writing). Waveboard

Waveboard — Stand-Alone Wave App is a post from: The Geekorium