Google Wave WaveThis Extension & Button

Today, Google Wave announced WaveThis, a way that allows you to create a discussion in Wave from a webpage you’ve visited.

They’ve offered a few ways to do this.

The first way is to install the WaveThis extension for your Google Chrome browser. This adds a WaveThis button you can click on at anytime to create a discussion with your friends in Google Wave.

The second way is to add a WaveThis bookmarklet to your Chrome, Firefox, or Safari browser. Simply drag the following link to your browser’s bookmarks bar: WaveThis.

Then, click this button from your bookmarks whenever you want to create a conversation in Wave about the webpage you are visiting.

Webmasters and bloggers can also take advantage of WaveThis. They can add a WaveThis button (such as the one to the left of this post) to their webpages or blog posts that allow any visitors to click that button and share and discuss the website with friends or coworkers in Wave.

Inside Look at the Google Wave Extension Gallery

Earlier this month, Google Wave announced the new extension gallery that organizes and features the latest and most useful extensions for Google Wave. You can access the extension gallery in the navigation pane. You can view all listed extensions or view the featured extensions. For some extensions, you can even try them out before you install them.

The nice thing about the gallery is that any extension submitted into the gallery is subjected to a review process that ensures quality and continuity within the Wave interface.

This means that some extensions are not included in the gallery. For example, we’ve talked about Rosy the translation bot and WavePlayer, but these extensions are not included in the gallery.

My complaint earlier on with extensions and gadgets was that there was a chaotic nature about them.

What’s next for Google Wave?

Last week, Google announced that Google Wave would be fully opened to the public for use. There is no longer a need for an invite. Anyone can join Wave now. Just login using your current Google account.

As you might remember, Wave was met with a lot of criticism from people once it was opened up for preview. I remember when I got my invite. I was so excited. However, upon trying it out, I had a hard time seeing the point of it all. I found the whole entire program to be slow, buggy, and a bit pointless. Perhaps, you felt the same.

Even so, I decided to give it a try, and I actually created this blog to share my experience and learnings.

Google Wave promised that they’ve listened attentively to our feedback and have made a bunch of improvements over the past six months.

Stephanie Hannon, product manager for Google wave, writes [...]

Follow-Up: Pros & Cons for Google Wave in Academia

You might recall I wrote a post a couple months ago with a few tips for using Google Wave to write an academic paper. Now that the semester is finally finished, and the paper is all done, I wanted to follow-up more on how that process went and the pros and cons of using Google Wave to write a group paper in the academic setting.

Background Information

To give you a bit more background information on our research paper, our paper reported our findings from a survey instrument we created for people to take. We had to analyze hundreds of responses and then report our findings in our paper. There were six of us in the group, and our research looked at six different specific but very inter-related areas within the research we were doing. So each member of the group was responsible for analyzing their assigned area and then incorporating and connecting their findings with the other areas of research into a comprehensive and complete paper.

We used Google Wave to write our paper. Wave proved to be very useful for this type of project but lacked in some areas. Let’s take a look.

5 Tips for Using Google Wave to Write an Academic Paper

I am in my final semester at university right now, and for one of my senior classes, I have to do a group research project and write a group paper summarizing and explaining research with five other people. In my whole college career, I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited to write a group paper as I have been when we received this assignment.

I don’t think the rest of my group really understood why I was so excited, but the fact was, I couldn’t wait to try Google Wave out to see how it would work with writing a group paper. I’ll tell you what I think of using Google Wave to write a group paper, but here are some things I’ve learned so far in the process.

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.