In-depth Review of Google Wave Translation Bots

We’ve talked before about how to use the Aunt Rosy bot to translate your waves into another language. Truth be told, Aunt Rosy is not the only translation bot out right now. I also don’t know what everyone else’s experiences with Aunt Rosy are, but I’ve experienced some problems with it glitching and then filling up the wave with a bunch of repeated translations. So I thought we’d review a couple other translation bots for Google wave and see what they have to offer too: Translatey and Multilingual.

Aunt Rosie translation bot

Because I already explained how to use Aunt Rosie in another post, I’ll be brief here. It seems like Aunt Rosie is one of the most popular translation bots used right now. Unlike some other translation bots, Aunt Rosie gives you the ability to translate in realtime. Your words are translated as you type them underneath your blip.

New Look for Google Wave Tips

Earlier today, you might have experienced some down time. We were working on getting a new design installed for gwTips that we’ve had in the works. If you recall, the last design was a bit bland, so we wanted to “spice” it up a little bit with a new look and logo while keeping some of the simplicity that made the previous version easy to navigate and get around.

All to say, check it out and see what you think. If you’re reading this in a feed reader, come on over and give it a look. Let us know what you think and if you run into any problems or bugs. Also, please feel free to throw out some suggestions for any features you’d like to see in the future.

Enjoy!

7 Unique Ways to Use Google Wave… that maybe You didn’t Think of

We’ve all probably heard by now of the real basic and practical ways of using Google Wave like: note taking, brainstorming, organizing events, social networking, etc., but I wanted to compile a list that thought a little bit outside of the box.

And I wanted to ask you, based on your own areas of work, interests, and ideas, what creative, unique, or practical ways to use Google Wave have you come up with or used? I thought it’d be cool if we could start some sort of list.

1.) Songwriting

Aside from being a part-time internet geek, I’m also a musician and songwriter. It’s pretty common to collaborate and to co-write with other folks for some projects that I do. My brother also writes too, and often times we just send a bunch of emails back and forth with revisions and edits. The email copies quickly accumulate.

Google Wave Adds Features: Read Only & Restore

Google Wave has just updated itself with two brand new spankin’ features: the ability to add participants who can only read a wave, and the ability for any participant with full access to a wave to restore the wave to any previous state visible in playback.

Read Only Participants

As the creator of a wave, I have the ability to add and make participants in the conversation to either have full access to the wave or read only access. In the wave that you have created, click the picture of any of the participants at the top of the wave, and you’ll see you have an option to change their permissions.

Wavers Collaborating for Haiti

The tragic earthquake that happened in Haiti last week has prompted Wavers to collaborate together with information about relief, news updates, and more in public waves.

Earlier today, @googlewave gave a shout out to these Wavers:

A shout out to Wavers who’ve been collaborating on Haiti relief information and updates in public waves: http://bit.ly/5qI1aO

If you do a public search of “with:public tag:haiti” you’ll quickly find quite a list of public waves with resources, information, and updates for Haiti.

The Best of Google Wave Tips 2009

Happy holidays to all of you Wavers!

We’ll admit our blog is still pretty young, but we thought it would be cool if we compiled a list of the best Google Wave tips so far based on the amount of views and your comments. We appreciate your support so far and how you’ve told your friends about us. We’re excited to see what 2010 will bring in the world of Google Wave.

Here we go.

How Do You Delete a Wave?

Google Wave is intuitive, but it isn’t quite as simple as email. In Wave, you can’t just hit a “Delete” button to get rid of a wave forever. Deleting aside, there are other options to manage your waves; there are some big differences between unfollowing, archiving, and trashing waves (which is recommended reading).

Despite these useful options for managing waves, people still seem to be a bit stumped about the basic function of deleting a wave. Well, the reason why you haven’t figured out how to “delete a wave” (in the most conventional sense) is because you can’t.

How to Use Poll Gadget 2.0 in Google Wave

Google Wave has a basic “Yes/No/Maybe” gadget but this can be a bit limiting when you have a question for participants in a wave that goes beyond a yes, no, or maybe answer. However, Poll Gadget 2.0 allows you to create a custom poll with custom options and settings. It’s one of the best customizable poll gadget that I’ve used so far.

Here’s how you can add it to a wave.

How to Add a “Whiteboard” in Google Wave

The Napkin gadget allows you to insert a “whiteboard” right into Google Wave so you can collaborate with live, handwritten drawings. You can customize brush color and size, and you have options to undo or clear your drawing.

Surely, this won’t necessarily allow you to create any artistic masterpieces, but it is a good way to share visual ideas if you happen to think that sort of way.

It’s really easy to add to your wave. Here’s how you can do it.

Google Releases URL Shortener, may help Wave

Google just recently announced the release of their new URL shortening service, goo.gl, and Facebook appears to be testing their own too, fb.me. Yup — of course we wouldn’t ever need any more URL shortening services.

Nonetheless, URL shortening services have taken the world by storm. These services simply generate short URLs that redirect to the long URL. TinyURL (among others) pioneered this concept, with bit.ly quickly outdoing others, providing stats (i.e. clicks and other information) for bit.ly-shortened links. Thanks to these services, users can send small URLs to their friends, instead of gigantic paragraph-like links.

Twitter has probably brought the most popularity to URL shortening services; users have to be able to share links and other information in under 140 characters. Considering Google and Facebook are entering the URL shortening service market, that tells us just how important Twitter is.

So what’s this have to do with Google Wave?