Well now Chrome has a neat little extension that does the same thing. Jeremy Selier has built a neat little plugin that shows you how many unread waves you have in your inbox. It checks every thirty minutes by default (at the request of the Wave team), but you can set it to check more frequently in the extension options.

Something that makes a sound, or pops up a notification box (Growl-style) would be even more useful in some circumstances (Firefox is still my main browser of choice). However, if you need a simple way to see new Wave activity without checking the window every couple of minutes, this might just be the thing.

Chrome Extension — Google Wave Checker

Google Wave Checker Extension for Chrome 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

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.

Expectations is a post from: The Geekorium

But were you aware that Local Waves have popped up everywhere as well, and you can find users near you just by plugging your city/suburb into the search (with the public wave search) eg. [with:public city name]. If you can’t immediately find a Wave for your location, you can start one! Just create a crafty title, and make the Wave public. Encourage people who join to mark themselves on a map, and shout out their Twitter/social details for people to connect elsewhere.

Have a tonne of fun, and stay safe!

Find Local Waves is a post from: The Geekorium

Five Things to Do When You Get Google Wave is a post from: The Geekorium

The Complete Guide to Google Wave

Where to Start is a post from: The Geekorium

gxg at FORS 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.

3 Things you should know about Wave is a post from: The Geekorium

Reply to a message at the end of a wave. The new message will appear at the same indentation level, at the very end of the wave.

[… But also has the …]

Just this one shortcut has made my experience of Wave a thousand times better. You might find something that helps you out too!

Keyboard shortcuts [Google Wave Help]

Learn these now! [Keyboard Shortcuts] is a post from: The Geekorium

7) Creating Folders in Google Wave allows you to create categories for your Wave documents. This is also useful to clean the Google Wave Inbox of older Waves and file the Waves documents. To move a Wave document to a Folder: click on a Wave document and dragdrop it to the Folder name.

Also check out this simple tip to add video to a wave

11 + 1 Google Wave Tips at Nethead is a post from: The Geekorium

Three Google Wave Searches Worth Saving [Smarterware]

More Wave Searches is a post from: The Geekorium