Posts Filed Under ‘Google Wave’
My latest two videos are up at Fast Company: one's on firewalling your attention with time blocking, and the second is on three ways to use Google Wave in your business.
The time blocking piece is actually a personal confession about my hermit tendencies. Sometimes I just shut everything off, fall off the face of the planet, and have some uninterrupted me-time. I've had co-workers say to me, "Um, where did you go today?" and the answer is usually "To my happy place, a distraction-free zone." As you'll hear in the video, at my last office job, I actually used to schedule a meeting with myself complete with a conference room to get away and focus on something for awhile. Here's the 2 minute, 37 second clip.
Read the rest »
A week ago I asked readers to tell me how they're using Google Wave in their daily lives, and despite a bit of "ha! no one's using Wave!" snarking on the Twitter, I got lots of interesting responses. Unsurprisingly, most Wavers use it as a real-time wiki, but some take advantage of features unique to Wave, like inline and private replies, public tags, and gadgets. I featured the most unique use cases I got in a brand new chapter just added to The Complete Guide to Google Wave. The following is the text of the just-published Chapter 10, which describes ways in which a few people who don't work for Google are using Wave to get things done--with screenshots.
Read the rest »
Once you're active in Google Wave, you want to know if something new is happening there--even if you don't have Wave open in your web browser. Several Wave notifier applications and browser add-ons can do the work of checking your Wave inbox for you, and letting you know you've got new and changed waves.
The following is an excerpt from the all-new Chapter 9 of The Complete Guide to Google Wave. Got feedback? Let me know in the comments and help write the first book on Wave!
Read the rest »
Google Wave may be in invite-only preview and still lack important features, but early adopters ARE using it--and we want to hear about it. Tell us about how you use Wave on a day-to-day basis, and your use case just might get included in The Complete Guide to Google Wave, the first book about Wave.
My co-author Adam and I are updating the book to replace theoretical, potential uses for Wave with real-world case studies of actual humans putting Google Wave to good use. We need your help. If you're waving regularly, please tell us about it, and we may include your story in the book.
Update: The brand new chapter 10, called "Wave in Action," has been posted. Check it out!
Read the rest »
One of the most-needed missing features in the Google Wave preview rolls out this week: user access permissions. Now, rather than everyone being able to edit everyone else's blips in a total free-for-all, the creator of a wave can add users and groups and give them either full access to edit everything, or read-only access. The binary choice is still too limiting, but GOOG says that "Reply only" access is on its way.
To limit a contact's access to a blip you created, click on their icon on the top of the wave and choose "Read only" from the drop-down, as shown. You can give both individual users and groups read-only access; though individual access permissions trump that of the groups. (For example, if the public group has read-only access, you can grant a single user full access to edit, even though that person's part of the group.) You can only set permissions for waves you have created.
Along with this first iteration of access permissions, the Wave team also added a "Restore" button to Wave's playback feature. If a wave gets destroyed beyond easy repair, you can use playback to roll it back to a former version of itself.
Even though this means quite a bit of revision to the book, it's great to see Wave evolving into something much more usable. I've also updated the Wave vs. the Rest chart to reflect this new feature.
Got a great response to last week's frequently asked questions about Google Wave, and it's worth expanding further on the differences between Wave and the current crop of web-based collaboration offerings.
Wave combines features from email, instant messenger, Google Docs, wikis, and forums and throws its own spin on things. For a quick visual of its offerings versus similar tools, check out this feature-by-feature comparison.
Read the rest »
The Google Wave Preview has been available to one million+ people for over three months now, but questions about Wave still abound, even by the early adopters who have gotten in and taken it for a test drive.
After publishing a book on everything I know about Wave, I still get many of the same questions I heard back when I started. Even folks usually bullish about new technology still don't understand what they can use Wave for, how to sell it to their friends and co-workers so they have someone to use it with, and how to fit it into their workday.
As much as I'd love it if everyone bought a copy of my book for every person they invite to Wave, reading 102 pages just to "get" a product is ridiculous. So, I've compiled some of the most frequently asked questions I've gotten about Wave and my best (and briefest) answers for them right here in quick-fire format.
Step inside to hear a two-word definition of Wave, what it's useful for, why you'd choose it over similar products, and how to do the things in Wave that most often trip up new users.
Read the rest »
Google Wave 2009 Year-End Screencast ·
It's still not easy to explain what, exactly, Google Wave does and is, but it sure does make for some cool screencasts. Hit play for a Wave-powered trip through 2009. (If you liked this, see also Good Wave Hunting and Pulp Wave Fiction.) · December 22nd, 2009, 2 comments
Yesterday the Google Wave team confirmed Wave's unfinished but working Google Groups integration, which lets you send waves to groups of participants in one shot. To try it out, I created The Complete Guide to Google Wave Wavers group. Join that Google Group with your Google account email (not your Wave ID), then search for group:wave-guide-wavers@googlegroups.com in Wave to see and update group waves. Sound confusing? It is.
While I'd seen this rudimentary support for groups mentioned in various public waves, we didn't include it in the Preview edition of The Complete Guide to Google Wave because it seemed so utterly unfinished (and it wasn't officially documented). Right now, there's no way to add users to Wave groups in-Wave, and messages to the group in Wave don't show up on the list and vice versa. There's obviously a whole lot of work to be done in the Groups arena as it relates to Wave, but for now, this is what we've got. Give it a try and let me know what you think in Wave.
Waving with Groups [The Google Wave Blog]
How do Google Groups access settings interact with waves? [Google Wave Help]
Chrome Beta for Mac/Linux Released · Today Google finally releases a beta of Google Chrome for Mac and Linux. I've been using a Chromium build on my Mac for awhile now, and while it's faster than Firefox on the Mac, it's not nearly as fast and stable as the Windows version of Chrome. Also, without Google Gears for Mac OS X 10.6, Chrome and Google webapps are even less useful on the Mac. While I was on the road with my MacBook over the last few weeks, I found myself missing my desktop PC back at home only because of the more-stable Chrome and Gears availability. Will Gears for 10.6 will ever come out, since they're phasing it out in favor of HTML5? With features that depend on Gears like offline Gmail coming out of Labs, you'd think so. · December 8th, 2009
O'Reilly has posted the video of my 15-minute keynote speech at Web 2.0 Expo this week, entitled "Making Sense of Google Wave." There were over 2,000 people seated in the audience, and I was nervous. I wanted to communicate my enthusiasm about Wave but also get across that it's an power tool for power users, with a learning curve.
Take a gander at the video.
Read the rest »
Been hard at work readying The Complete Guide to Google Wave for its PDF debut this month. The Wave team has been making it more difficult with (welcome) changes to the app on the final days of copyedit. I've been updating a book-specific Twitter stream, @gwaveguide, with Wave news and tips, but wanted to round up three of my favorite must-know items here.
- You already know that public waves are a great way to interact with people on Google Wave (especially if your friends and co-workers haven't been invited yet). But the problem with public waves is that they were opt-out instead of opt-in: the moment you opened a public wave, you got added to its participants list. Today the Wave team fixed that madness. The "mute" button, which you would have to press to keep an active wave from constantly popping up in your inbox with new content, has been replaced with "unfollow."* Instead of getting automatically added to a public wave's participant list by just opening it, it's now opt-in: you click "Follow" to get a wave's updates in your Inbox. Follow/unfollow works for any wave, too--not just public waves. For now, unfollow is a stop-gap solution for the inability to remove yourself from a wave. Here's more on using follow and unfollow.
- Speaking of public waves, making a wave public is a weird pain in the ass using the
public@a.gwave.com contact (which disappears from your Contacts panel any chance it gets). Instead, use the easypublic@appspot.com bot.
- Hold down the Shift key to select multiple waves in the Search panel, and the you can archive, mark as read, unread, or move them to a folder in one shot.
Read the rest »
I'm tickled pink to finally announce the project I've been hard at work on for weeks now: my new book, The Complete Guide to Google Wave, is now available to read and share for free at completewaveguide.com.
Anyone who reads my stuff or listens to This Week in Google knows that I'm a Google Wave nut. Yes, it's a hyped, complex, do-it-all web application, but the sheer ambition is part of Wave's appeal for me. Since I logged onto Wave's developer sandbox back in June, I've spent a whole lot of time in Wave, figuring out how it works and what it might do--and blogging about my discoveries just didn't cut it. So, along with Adam Pash from Lifehacker, I've compiled everything we know how to do in Google Wave in a book format at completewaveguide.com. I'm calling it a book, but for now it's just a web site--with eight "chapters" and two "appendices," free for you to read, share, and if we're lucky, help us expand. The site will grow into traditional book formats, however: thanks to the team at 3ones, a PDF version of the book's preview edition will be available for purchase this month. In January of 2010, a softcover print version of the book's first edition will be available as well as an updated PDF. Adam and I have committed to four editions throughout 2010, so the book will change and evolve along with Wave. The latest and greatest version of the book will always be available for free at completewaveguide.com.
I turned down a request-for-proposal from my traditional book publisher to try this experiment in iterative self-publishing. I ran down the whole story of why on the book's About page. This approach scratches several itches I've had for years: I've always wanted to publicly collaborate on a book using MediaWiki, try my hand at self-publishing, and license a book under Creative Commons. Now, to see how it will all turn out. Check out the book and let me know what you think. (Also, follow @gwaveguide on Twitter for Wave tips and book news.)
After only a few weeks of Wave usage, my inbox is been teeming with activity, full of waves from strangers who have added me and 17 other strangers to items I don't particularly care about. Rather than shoot for inbox zero in Wave and spend the time archiving everything in sight, I'm going with the flow--with the help of a few saved searches. Besides the previously-mentioned with:public search, three other saved searches are making drilling down to my most important waves much easier.
Read the rest »
Google Wave’s Best Use Cases · Phew! After poring over 661 Google Wave invitation contest submissions, I highlighted some of Wave's best use cases over at Lifehacker this morning. See how Wave will help people get things done in medicine, academia, transportation, journalism, entertainment, disaster relief, business, family life, and more. Thanks to everyone who took the time to describe what they do and how they want to use realtime collaboration to streamline it. Congrats to all the winners--your invitation nominations are in! · October 14th, 2009, 2 comments
Subscribe
Follow
2 comments »
I'm 
