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.