The Geekorium

Home of Rex Havoc, Space Adventurer and other assorted Geekeries.

  1. 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 [“our patch” wave search]. John Blossom write useful waves about Wave [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 - 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 josh@nunnone.com 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

  5. Lijit Search: Impeccable customer service

    lijit
    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.

    More!

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

  6. 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.

  8. 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.

    More!