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"><img src="[your-button-image]" alt="Wave at me!"></a>

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!!!

Wave This API released. Plus Official Chrome Extension and Bonus Unofficial WordPress Widget is a post from: The Geekorium

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.

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.

Perhaps this feature was always on the cards, or maybe it was a reaction to the 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.

Google Wave Gets Email Notifications is a post from: The Geekorium

In my post yesterday I noted the increased push by the Wave developers to make it easier for the wave community to build and deploy extensions. It turns out this flurry of activity coincided with the imminent release of Version 2 of the Wave API, announced today.

The first new feature is the:

Active API: In v2, robots can now push information into waves (without having to wait to respond to a user action). This replaces the need for our deprecated cron API, as now you can update a wave when the weather changes or the stock price falls below some threshold. You can learn more in the Active API docs.

If I understand this correctly (and I’m not a developer so correct me if I’m wrong) this means that before today, a robot in a wave might have had to wait until a user opened a wave before it could refresh the information in the wave (updating stocks etc), now the robot can initiate a wave update itself, making it possible to have robots create new blips in response to events. This is a much smarter way for a robot to behave, and should make for far more interesting and functional bots.

For a more enlightened perspective from a wave developer, check out Mastering Wave’s take on the announcement.

So what I initially thought was just a push to get developers involved was actually leading to an announcement of a massive upgrade to the API. In the end though, the aim is the same — to get developers engaged and creating interesting software to make Wave an indispensable tool.

Google Wave Developer Blog: Introducing Robots API v2: The Rise of Active Robots.

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

Google Wave Births “Active Robots” is a post from: The Geekorium

Now Google have made it easier than ever to submit an extension to the Wave Extension review team using a simple bot.

Create a new wave and add the Submitty bot (submitty-bot@appspot.com), and Submitty will create a submission form for you to fill out. At the bottom are a couple of checkboxes. If you check either of these boxes, you’ll be prompted to fill in more information about your bot and/or gadget. Finally, you add the Extension Review Group (google-wave-extensions-review@googlegroups.com) to your wave to submit your extension.

By making this process easier, the Wave team hopes to encourage development of extensions to rapidly build up an ecosystem around Wave. Without a varied and useful set of apps, Wave will remain no more than a fun experiment.

Which also explains their dedication to an extensive and open API which they continue to enhance with supporting bots. In addition to the Submitty bot, they have released Gadgitty, a bot for editing your gadgets inline and seeing the results straight away.

Between these two bots and the others submitted by the Google Wave APIs Team, it’s obvious how important developers are to the creators of Wave, and I hope it spurs further experimentation from the wave community.

Submitty and Gadgitty — Two Bots to Help Wave Developers is a post from: The Geekorium

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.

• 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…

This is tremendous news, and along with the ability to make participants read-only, and even score them with karma 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.

Lars: Remove Participant Feature due “Within a Month” 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

The service does not yet allow you to add users by their googlewave.com account (gmail.com only), and the permissions can only be handled through the Google Groups interface. It also seems that to avoid spam (being able to send messages to an everyone in a public group at once) users must pro-actively seek out the group wave and follow it to move it to their inbox [currently waiting for confirmation of this].

Like any Wave feature, this is still being developed and its behaviour could change over time. The Wave team have said they will continue to enhance the groups feature to make groups easier to navigate.

Waving with groups — Google Wave Blog.

Group Waves is a post from: The Geekorium

The downside of this was a significant gotcha: just clicking a public wave was enough to add you to the Wave permanently and drag the wave into your inbox. From that point, your only recourse to silence the wave was to mute it (archiving only works as long as no one else contributes), and muting does not remove you from the wave.

The inability to remove yourself from a wave you have participated in is an accounting feature I guess. When the development team finally gives us the ability to remove ourselves, we still need to know which waves we have participated in.

But back to the sticky business of autofollowing public waves. What it meant was the risk of associating with Waves you never meant to follow. A misplaced click (very easy in the fast-flowing river of public waves) meant a new wave in your inbox and your face on the top of a wave. For example, clicking a wave called  “I hate my boss” immediately associated you with that wave!

Today Google have rolled out a new feature to fix this. Two new buttons now let you Follow and Unfollow a wave. When you click on an interesting public wave, you are no longer added automatically. Once you click off that wave, it will disappear into the stream and you will have no further part in it. To monitor it in your inbox/folder structure, you can now choose to follow it (using the Follow button of course), and it will move into your inbox, where you can treat it like any other wave you are in. You can move it to folders, searches will include it and it will behave like a normal wave with one key difference: you will not appear in the list of wave users at the top.

This makes a huge difference, and means that public waves now take on a sort of social networking aspect, as you can follow the information and people who interest you without being directly involved (sort of like feed readers or Twitter lists). It also improves the user experience by making public waves something you have to explicitly choose to have in your inbox.

To remove a wave from your inbox, you can simply click Unfollow and the wave will disappear as though it was never there.

Keep in mind though that the public wave behaves as it used to the second you edit it. As soon as you create or edit a blip, the wave will add you as a participant and the wave will appear in your inbox as though you had followed the wave. This makes perfect sense, as participation triggers all the accounting measures that must keep track of who made what changes. Unfollow will not remove you from the wave, it will merely be archived from view (the old Mute function).

All in all these changes are a welcome fix to one of the most vexing problems of the initial release. I look forward to seeing the other improvements as Google Wave develops!

Follow your waves — Google Wave Blog.

Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow the Waves You Choose is a post from: The Geekorium

When to use Google Wave [Google Wave Help]

Using Google Wave is a post from: The Geekorium

As soon as we’re confident that the system can accept more users, we will add a wave to your account that allows you to nominate friends and colleagues for an account. Once you have the capability to invite people, the wave appear in your inbox.

So we’ll be seeing this eventually (goodness knows how it’s added — magic fairy dust perhaps), so don’t fret — All in good time!

Expecting invites to give out? This is why you might not have them is a post from: The Geekorium