So far you've learned the finer workings of Wave in great detail, but there's a big difference between understanding how to swing a hammer and building a house. In this chapter, you'll meet regular people who are already getting things done with Wave in their daily work and life. You'll learn the Wave techniques they've developed through trial and error, and the specific Wave features they use to get certain jobs done. Finally, you'll create wave templates you can use and reuse for your own purposes.

Take a look at some real-world case studies of Wave in action.

Wave as a Group To-do List and Daily Work Log

Justin Swall runs Swall's Associated Services, a small company which provides computer repair and consulting for small businesses. Justin uses Wave as a daily to-do list that he and his co-workers update to track who has done what. He makes use of the "Copy to New Wave" feature to transfer undone items from one day to the next, as shown in Figure 10-1.

Here's Justin's Wave workflow: every day he uses a fresh wave that contains that day's tasks, ordered by priority, and what time they're due. Over the course of the day, Justin's group updates the wave to reflect the current status of each task.

Justin says:

During the day either the initial wave is edited (usually by me) to add additional items to the list, and everyone else uses inline replies to update when items are completed, or if additional information needs to be conveyed back and forth. At the end of each day I copy the day's wave to a new wave, change the date to the next day, remove the items that were completed the day before, add new items or notes to the list, or move items from secondary to primary. Wash, rinse, repeat.

By creating a new wave that carries over the outstanding tasks left on yesterday's wave, Justin leaves behind a daily work log that he can reference later.

Justin prefers Wave to discuss tasks because it's a single, hosted conversation.

For various reasons, Outlook tasks never seemed to work for us. Emailing is a nightmare (I either keep thinking of more things to add to the list and end up sending out five or more messages by morning, or I'm so afraid of doing that I keep it open as a draft so I can keep adding to it then forget to send it at all).

If you're interested in using Wave to manage projects beyond daily tasks, see the later section in this chapter, "Wave for Project Management."

Wave as an Event Planner

Wave is a fine productivity tool, but it also can help you have fun, too. Fifteen-year old Sean Cascketta uses Wave to organize weekend get-togethers with his classmates.

Sean explains:

If I'm formatting a Wave for organizing an event, it usually comes with a basic list of the details (like who, what, where, etc...) as well as a Yes/No/Maybe gadget, which is perfect for these events as we can both constantly check on the RSVP status of people, and they can use the status feature to give any extra details (like if they're bringing along some party favors, electronics or such).

Sean used Wave to create an invitation to a viewing of The Goonies, as shown in Figure 10-2.

Brunch-lover Jed McClure uses Wave to organize his weekly "Brooklyn Brunch Club," a group of friends who brunch somewhere different in Brooklyn each week, and RSVP whether or not they can make it.

Jed describes the process:

We have a pretty dedicated group of brunchers here in Brooklyn, and many brunch options. But the onerous task of coordinating usually ended up resulting in people getting left off the email list. With Google Wave, the idea was to maintain a permanent Brunch wave, where people in the group could check in with and see where the next brunching would happen, and then reply if they were going to try to make it. We also set up a map widget and filled in all the spots we like to hit, to help when making suggestions (and to avoid the dreaded brunch rut).

The Brooklyn Brunch Club wave consists of maps, inline discussions debating which brunch place to hit up next, and a Yes/No/Maybe gadget to collect RSVPs, as shown in Figure 10-3.

Jed says:

So far it has worked pretty well. The threaded nature of the dialog means that it needs to be 'pruned' after each brunch, so that the relevant info remains at the top of the wave. And also train people to look in the history for past brunch details.

With maps and Yes/No/Maybe built in, party, vacation, brunch, or any event planning is one of Wave's most obvious use cases.

Wave as Holiday Gift List Tracker

Hal Wilke has two young children, and when the holidays approach, he gives gift suggestions for his kids to their grandparents. This past year he and his wife used Wave to share and update the list.

Hal explains:

We always email Christmas lists to Grandparents, and then get emails back sometimes to me, sometimes to my wife. Or phone calls at odd times telling us what they bought, so we have to track notes that we write about the phone calls. It was much easier this year [in Wave] because the grandparents could edit the wave as they purchased gifts, and we did not have people buying duplicate gifts, and didn't have to track multiple lists of purchased gifts. Pretty cool that the grandparents were cool with using Wave.

The kids' gift wave included Hal's wife, but Hal used Wave's private reply feature to discuss a surprise gift for her with the kids’ grandparents, as shown in Figure 10-4.

Wave for Collaborative Meeting Notes

One of the most common suggested uses of Wave is taking collaborative notes^[1] during meetings, classes or conference sessions, and Indiana University employee Manjit Trehan does just that. Manjit's meetings usually have about 10 people attending, and four or five are in Wave, taking notes.

Instead of everyone co-editing a single blip, Manjit separates agenda items into their own individual blips.

Manjit says the process evolved from trial and error:

What I learned after a few meetings [of taking notes in Wave] is that it is best to enter one agenda item per blip. This allows a separate thread to progress below each item. Say we are meeting about ordering some hardware, and there are three open items to be discussed. Vendor selection, Installation schedule, and deployment schedule. Each of these would end up in a separate blip.

Manjit says meeting note waves can get lengthy, but he created a sample meeting wave with separate agenda blips, shown in Figure 10-5.

Wave for Project Management

You've already seen one way to use Wave as a daily task tracker; you can also manage a more complex group project in Wave. This very book, produced by a team of six people—including the authors, our copyeditor, designer, tech lead, and project manager—used Wave to track and manage its production process.^[2]

Create a project workspace in Wave using an agreed-upon tag and a saved search for waves with that tag. For example, when we started managing the book project in Wave, our group decided that every book-related wave would get the "cwg" tag (short for CompleteWaveGuide.com). Each of us also saved a tag:cwg search and referred to it to see only project-specific waves, as shown in Figure 10-6.

When you're managing a project in Wave, create a new wave to discuss each topic, task, or facet of the project. For example, for this book project, we used one wave per chapter to discuss chapter-specific questions and edits. For each new edition, we'd clean out the chapter wave of old blips, and start anew, knowing that old conversation was still archived in the wave's playback should we need to see it. We kept other separate waves to draft the style guide, discuss pricing, and see cover image revisions.

Wave as a Conference Backchannel

A smart use of wave tags works well in public waves as well as private ones. Tagged public waves make it easy for anyone to find a relevant place to discuss news or a current event, as it happens, in real-time. In fact, many tech-savvy conference organizers publicize a unique tag for its attendees to use when they post status updates to Twitter or photos to Flickr about the event. Attendees can use that same tag in Wave to create and add to event-specific discussions, too. (Those who aren't at the event can eavesdrop on those public waves, ask questions, and add to the discussion from afar.)

For example, at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in November of 2009, I (Gina) gave a keynote presentation called "Making Sense of Google Wave,"^[3] and invited attendees to wave about it using the public, agreed-upon conference tag w2e. Before I took the stage, I started a public wave and tagged it w2e so that anyone who searched for with:public tag:w2e could discuss my keynote or any other session they attended, as shown in Figure 10-7.

This technique has been used at events beyond Web 2.0 Expo; bloggers at both eComm Europe^[4] and the MediaWiki conference^[5] noted that attendees used Wave to take minutes, discuss sessions in real-time, and collaborate on notes.

(Watch a video of the 15-minute "Making Sense of Google Wave" keynote at http://goo.gl/7cK3.)

Wave for Breaking News

The live, real-time nature of Wave makes it a natural fit for collaborating on breaking news as it happens. In fact, when Seattle police were on the hunt for a man suspected of shooting four cops, the Seattle Times used a public wave to rapidly publish updates about the manhunt^[6] and solicit information from reader in the process, as shown in Figure 10-8.

Granted, most people aren't conducting a manhunt for a suspected killer, but we all have a reason to broadcast and get live updates on events as they happen to us—like when your sister-in-law goes into labor, or Aunt Martha's undergoing surgery, or Mom in New York is worried about how close the forest fires are to your home in San Diego and whether you've been evacuated.

Wave for Q&A

Wave's inline reply feature makes it a solid choice for having conversations that require back-and-forth on individual points: like an interview. Question and answer interactions can happen very easily in Wave, because the interviewer can start a wave with multiple questions. Then, the respondent can reply to each question inline, and the interviewer can optionally follow up to the response right below it without disrupting the flow of the series. The result is a readable Q&A in the correct order, as shown in Figure 10-9.

Create Wave Templates for Reuse

If you create waves with the same formatting and gadgets often, create a "template" wave for reuse to save yourself repetitive work. For example, if you plan a recurring event in Wave, create a new wave, and format your event title, description, and details area to your liking, and add the Yes/No/Maybe and maps gadget. Save that wave in a "Templates" folder you create.

Then, the next time you need a wave to plan the event, open the template, and select "Copy to new wave" from the timestamp drop-down. Fill in the details for the event in the new copy.

Public Wave Templates

Googler Pamela Fox did just that and made her templates public and read-only, available for anyone to copy for their own purposes. Visit the read-only, public wave which lists her templates at http://goo.gl/GNUw, like the event planner wave template shown in Figure 10-10.

References

1. ↑ When to use Google Wave, Google.com
2. ↑ How to Manage a Group Project in Google Wave, Lifehacker.com
3. ↑ "Making Sense of Google Wave": Web 2.0 Expo New York 2009, Web2Expo.com
4. ↑ How to Use Google Wave for Collaborative Conference Notes and Conversation, Emerging Tech Talk
5. ↑ MediaWiki conference uses Wave to work on minutes, Mediawiki Wave
6. ↑ Another Google Wave Use: Manhunt, TechCrunch.com

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!

Google Wave Add-on for Firefox

If you use Mozilla's popular web browser, Firefox, the Google Wave Add-on puts a Wave icon on the status bar at the bottom of your browser window. That icon displays alerts when you've got new, unread waves and keeps a running total of how many unread changes you've got in your inbox. Click on the icon to open Wave in a new tab for quick access. Set your Wave login information in the extensions's Options dialog, as shown in Figure 9-1.

Figure 9-1. The Google Wave Add-on for Firefox adds a Wave icon on the status bar of your web browser, which displays the number of unread and changed waves in your inbox.

Download the Google Wave Add-on for Firefox at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/14973. As of writing, the extension is listed as "experimental," which means it hasn't been reviewed by the Mozilla Add-ons editors. Check the box next to "Let me install this experimental add-on" to download and install it in your copy of Firefox.

Googsystray for Windows and Linux

If you'd rather get Wave notifications outside of your browser, Googsystray is a system tray utility for Windows and Linux that plays a sound when new waves arrive and displays unread wave notifications in the corner of your screen, as shown in Figure 9-2.

Figure 9-2. Googsystray plays an alert sound and displays a notification of new and changed waves in your system tray.

Click a Wave notification to open the unread wave directly in your browser. Googsystray is particularly useful if you're an all-around Google lover, as it also offers Gmail, Google Voice, Google Calendar, and Google Reader notifications. Download Googsystray for free from http://googsystray.sourceforge.net/.

Google Wave Notifier for Windows

Don't need all the bells, whistles, and multi-service support of Googsystray? The aptly named Google Wave Notifier is a Windows system tray utility that, like the others, alerts you of new and changed waves with unread content in a pop-up box and icon, as shown in Figure 9-3.

Figure 9-3. The Google Wave Notifier adds a Wave icon in the Windows system tray that displays the total number of new and unread waves in your inbox.

Like Googsystray, you can click on an alert to open the new wave directly. Download the Google Wave Notifier for free from http://wave-notify.sourceforge.net/.

Waveboard with Growl Notifications for Mac OS X

Mac users who want Wave notifications should try Waveboard. Waveboard is a free, standalone Wave client that adds a Waveboard icon with your total of unread waves on Mac OS X's menu bar and Dock. Waveboard also provides pop-up Growl notifications, as shown in Figure 9-4.

Figure 9-4. Waveboard for Mac OS X displays an icon with the total of unread waves on the menu bar and Dock, as well as Growl notifications.

To get Growl notifications with Waveboard, download and install Growl for your Mac from http://growl.info/. Waveboard is also a free download from http://www.getwaveboard.com/.

XMPP Lite for Google Talk and AIM

Unlike the other notifier apps and add-ons listed here, the XMPP Lite bot is a solution that you put to work directly inside the specific waves you want to receive updates from. If you add the XMPP Lite bot to a wave and then click the subscribe button in the blip it adds, you'll receive IM updates when that wave changes.

Figure 9-5. The XMPP Lite bot adds a blip with a Subscribe and Unsubscribe button to a wave. Click the Subscribe button to opt into instant messenger notifications of wave activity.

Gotcha: While all the other notifiers mentioned here let you know if you have ANY changed or unread waves in your inbox at all, XMPP Lite only notifies you about the specific waves you've added it to, and pressed the Subscribe button in.

XMPP Lite is one of this book's featured bots. For details on how to use it, head back to the "XMPP Lite (wave-xmpp@appspot.com)" section in Chapter 8.

Like the rest of the book, this was co-written by Adam Pash and myself (in this section, mostly Adam, bless his soul). We're working furiously on getting The Complete Guide to Google Wave's first edition--a step up from the Preview PDF--ready for print publication. What should we include or exclude? Let us know in the comments, and thanks in advance.

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.

You'll notice that Wave doesn't have a green yes in every cell in its column; it's still missing functionality that's holding it back from being a viable alternative in a production environment--specifically, user permissions (everyone can edit everything) and the ability to export a wave or publish it so that anyone can see its contents (not just folks logged into Wave).

This table is slated to go into chapter 1 of the first edition of The Complete Guide to Google Wave, so give me a shout if you've got ideas for how to polish it up before we boot up the printers.

Update, January 21st: Changed Wave's user access permissions column to reflect the newly-announced feature.

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.

Q: How do you describe what Google Wave is in the fewest words possible?

A: Two words: Google Wave is multimedia wikichat.

Ok, I cheated a little. Wikichat is my made-up word for the combination of document collaboration (wikis) and messaging (chat). Imagine a Wikipedia page that only your workgroup can access and that multiple people can change simultaneously, with live, inline chat embedded in it and the ability to add online multimedia like an image slideshow, videos, maps, polls, a Sudoku game, video conference call, and other interactive widgets. See it? That's Wave.

Q: Why would I use Wave instead of email?

A: You'd use Wave instead of email because you can have real-time, IM-like conversations inside it, and cut out the lag time of asynchronous email communication--you know, when you send an email and have to wait for your recipients to read, reply, and send one back. In Wave, if your recipient is online, you don't have to wait. In fact, your recipient can start typing before you stop. It's wacky.

Q: Then why would I use Wave instead of IM?

A: You'd use Wave instead of instant messenger because you can edit the same text, images, captions as someone else is at the same time. During an instant messenger conversation you pass back and forth a series of single-author, uneditable messages. In Wave, anyone can edit any message (or blip, in Wave-speak). Imagine correcting someone else's typos during a chat yourself, without pointing out to them that they mistyped.

Wave also supports conversation threads, which means that instead of one linear discussion where new messages appear on top or below old ones, you can branch off sub-chats on different topics in one wave.

But mostly you use Wave to collaborate on a single copy of a document with multiple people at the same time.

Q: Then why would I use Wave instead of Google Docs?

A: GDocs is more like collaborative/web-based Microsoft Word, where the object is to create a flat file that gets printed or emailed to someone. Wave is more like a real-time wiki, which creates pages meant to be linked and constantly revised, pages that contain web-based multimedia and interactive gadgets.

In Wave you can drop multimedia like image slide shows, YouTube videos, Google Maps, and countless other gadgets that you can't in Google Docs. Like a wiki (and unlike Google Docs), you can link waves to each other very easily.

Wave is more like a real-time, workgroup Wikipedia than Google Docs or email.

Q: So, what would I actually use Wave for?

A: Wave works when two or more people need to co-write a document. A few common use cases include:

• collaborative meeting, conference, or class notes--whether or not everyone's in the same physical room, several people taking notes in one place is much more efficient than everyone taking their own individual notes
• interviews--each question and answer series can be one thread within the parent interview thread, where the interviewer and interviewee can revise and expand questions and answers inline
• group event planning, like a party, trip, wedding
• co-writing and editing--whether it's books, blogs, brochures, policies
• surveys
• translations
• project management

The following are questions I've gotten from people already in the Wave Preview, trying to figure out how to use the system.

Q: Now that I've gotten into the Preview, how do I invite other people in?

A: Search for a wave called "Invite others to Google Wave." Enter title:"Invite others to Google Wave" into the search box, and press Enter. One wave with only you as a participant on it should turn up. In it, you can enter the email address of the folks you want to invite.

If no wave gets returned, be patient! Google may not have doled out nominations to you yet. Save your search to check back later by clicking the Save Search button on the bottom of the Search Panel.

Q: How do I use Wave if no one I know is ever online while I am?

A: To experience the real-time magic of Wave even if your friends aren't online, search for public waves in action using the with:public search operator. Select a wave at the top of the list of results, and watch as others type into it--then jump in yourself.

Q: How do I make a wave public?

A: The easiest way is to use the Easy Public bot. Add easypublic@appspot.com to your Contact list, and then drag and drop it onto any wave to make it public.

Q: How do I see the next unread blip in a wave?

A: Press the Spacebar. In a big wave with lots of unread blips in various locations, the Spacebar will take you to the next unread blip in one press.

Q: How do I publish a wave in a blog post?

A: Right now the Madoqua Bot can give you the embed code for putting a wave on a public web page. Add Madoqua to your wave to get started.

Remember, though: the people viewing your blog post or web page will have to be logged into Wave to see the embedded wave. Otherwise they'll just get a prompt to log into the Wave Preview, which is frustrating for people who aren't in Wave yet.

Q: How do I remove a Wave contact?

A: To remove a contact from your Wave contacts list, you've got to do so in the regular Google Contacts interface. Click on the Manage contacts link at the bottom of Wave's Contacts panel. Here's how to remove a contact step-by-step.

Q: How do I remove a participant from a wave?

A: You can only remove bots from waves--not regular users. Yes, this is crazy and needs to be fixed stat. Here's more on the inability to remove participants from a wave.

Q: How do I link to another wave inside a wave?

A: You can create a link to a wave in another wave by simply dragging and dropping the destination wave from the search panel onto the linking wave while you're editing it. Make sure all your participants have access to the linked wave, otherwise they won't be able to open it.

To link to a wave outside of Google Wave, first open the wave then minimize your Search panel. Copy and paste the link in your browser's address bar--that link will open that wave with those panels minimized for anyone who clicks on it, is logged into Wave, and has access to that wave.

Q: How do I set my Google Wave icon?

A: Click on your name at the top of the Contacts panel. From the profile pop-up, click the Edit profile button. A special profile wave opens, and there you can upload an image that will appear as your icon whenever you participate in a wave or appear in others' Contacts lists.

Q: How do I remove a gadget from a wave?

A: Hover over the gadget, and an arrow will appear on the top-right corner. Click it to view the drop-down and choose "Delete."

Q: Since my friends and co-workers don't use it every day, I forget to check my Wave inbox. How can I get notified when waves are updated without logging in?

The Google Wave Notifier (Windows only) is a system tray application that notifies you when you have unread blips in waves.

The Google Wave Add-on for Firefox notifies you of unread waves in Firefox's status bar.

Now I've got questions for you. I'm working on the next edition of The Complete Guide to Google Wave, and I want to know: what do you want to see get added to the book? What burning questions did I miss here? How are you using Wave day-to-day--or what's stopping you from doing so? Post your thoughts in the comments, and thanks in advance for your help expanding the book.

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]

EtherPad is a web-based collaborative text editor with a whole lot of ardent (geeky) fans, including John Resig of jQuery, who used it for project planning, and Jeff of the Wolfire Games blog, who used EtherPad in his blogging software to write posts. When EtherPad announced the Google acquisition on Friday, they said they were joining the Google Wave team and that no new pads could be created at EtherPad, effective immediately. The sudden service shutdown caused an uproar from existing customers and set a terrible precedent for web-based services. One of the biggest fears around moving data into web applications is that someday the service will shut down after you've become dependent on it. If Google wants users to get comfortable using web services--and obviously they do--it's up to them to ensure transitions like this are smooth for users. I'm happy to see that EtherPad and the Google Wave team responded so quickly to the user outcry and left the service online for current EtherPad users to prepare for the change. They could've avoided betraying their users' trust by handling it better to begin with; hopefully this experience will inform future acquisition transitions.

(In the meantime, I look forward to seeing how the Google Wave team incorporates some of EtherPad's superior text editor features into Wave.)

Take a gander at the video.

See also Andrew LaVallee's impressions of the talk in his WSJ blog post, Google Wave (Not) For Dummies. You can see all the Web 2.0 Expo talks on YouTube as well here.

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.)