Category Archives: News

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. Continue reading →

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 [...] Continue reading →

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! Continue reading →

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? Continue reading →

Undo and redo are functions that many people rely on when typing their documents. These two important functions have not been available on Google Wave until now. To undo something in your wave, press CTRL/CMD+Z. To redo, press SHIFT+CTRL/CMD+Z. For more hotkeys and shortcuts, we have them here. Continue reading →

Google acquired AppJet last Friday; once the acquisition took place, Google announced that they would discontinue EtherPad service at the end of March next year. Google has now changed their action in response to the outcry of EtherPad users; now, EtherPad service will not be discontinued until Google releases EtherPad as open source code. Continue reading →

AppJet, the company and creators of EtherPad, an online collaborative word processor, has just been bought by Google Wave. As announced on the EtherPad blog, the EtherPad team will continue it’s work, but with Google Wave.

A Google spokesperson says in an email:

AppJet is a team of highly-talented entrepreneurs with deep expertise in real-time web collaboration. Google and AppJet have a shared vision of how web collaboration can benefit users, and we’re excited to have the AppJet team contribute to the success of Google Wave.

Continue reading →

Paul Bucheit, the creator of Gmail and co-founder of FriendFeed commented on Wave killing email and said, “Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.” When asked for further comments regarding Wave, he noted that he hadn’t actually tried Wave yet.

Well, he finally did. And didn’t change his opinion. Continue reading →