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. Give it a try!

To format the link for this button, you would use the following structure, while replacing the necessary elements for your webpage:

https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?u=http://gwtips.com/google-wave-this-extension-button&t=Google+WaveThis+Extension+and+Button&c=Discuss+this+post+with+friends

More thoughts

The WaveThis button is reminiscent of the “Retweet” button for sharing on Twitter, “Digg this” to share on Digg, and “Like this” to share on Facebook. This is Google’s step towards making Wave a more easily accessible platform to share and discuss information with other people.

Douwe Osinga, software engineer for Google Wave, says the WaveThis button allows you to create a “small group” discussion about a particular webpage you are visiting. He says, “[WaveThis is] less public than broadcast tools and more interactive than using email.”

Right now, I would have a hard time finding a practical use for this as most of my social networks are on Facebook. It’s so much easier to share a link on Facebook and get instant feedback from the 700 of my “friends.” However, I can see Wave having a particular advantage in that you can limit the conversation to only a few friends. I can see potential for this if it catches on.

Questions for Our Readers

As an internet surfer, do you foresee yourself utilizing the WaveThis extension and button very much? What are your thoughts?

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:

If you tried Google Wave out a while ago, and found it not quite ready for real use, now is a good time to come back for a second try. Wave is much faster and much more stable than when we began the preview, and we have worked hard to make Wave easier to use.

Opening up Wave to the public should be a very helpful step. Wave is meant to be used with people and groups. Wave is not merely an individual tool, although I suppose you could use it as such. In preview, we might not have received the clearest picture of what Wave was capable of since a lot of the people we would potentially collaborate with were closed out from Wave because they didn’t have an invite. I know that I didn’t really first see the power of Wave until I wrote a group academic research paper for university.

At the same time, with a public release, the demand for a fast and easy-to-use interface will be intensified. In preview, when I invited my most tech-savvy friends to Wave, even they were quite a bit confused by the interface. There is a definitely a learning curve involved.

All to say, I’m excited to see the ways I can use Wave for group projects and collaboration here in the future.

What do you think though? Is Google Wave headed in the right direction? What type of use have you found for Wave?

Share your comments below.

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!

Read Only Participants

As the creator of a wave, I now 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.

Again, you can only do this if you are the creator of the wave. You can’t change the permissions of someone in a wave that you were added to as a participant.

Restore from Playback

Any participant in a wave that has full access permissions can restore a wave from a previous point by hitting the “Playback” button in the toolbar, scrolling to a previous point in the wave, and hitting the “Restore” button.

The nice thing about this feature is that once you restore a wave to a previous point the newly restored point is added to the end of the playback, so you don’t lose the history of previous updates to the wave.

The Google Wave blog mentions that these features can help keep a wave on topic by being able to restore the wave to a previous point and give you the ability of limiting folks who aren’t being good contributors to the conversation to a “read only” permission.

More promised to come…

It’s nice that Google Wave is listening to users’ feedback. Wavers have been feeling the need for more administrative control over their waves. This has been needed for awhile now. However, the Google Wave team makes promise not to just stop there but plans to add more new features including:

• “Reply-only” setting – In addition to the newly added permissions “Full access” and “Read Only,” “Reply-only” would let users add new blips but prevent them from editing blips that they did not create.
• Interface design enhancements – There is also promise that some elements of the interface will be redesigned to allow you to change the permissions of more participants more easily at one time.

This is a good update I’d say.

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. In this terrible tragedy, Google Wave is showing potential for being a very useful platform for allowing people to come together and share not only updates, news, and promote awareness, but also to come together to make a wide, quick social response and action to the situation in Haiti. The question of, “How can Google Wave be useful for emergency management and response?” has come to the surface.

Here are some waves that are attempting to use Google Wave as a tool for response in the Haiti earthquake and waves that are discussing how Wave can assist in this as a new piece of technology:

CrisisCamp Wave – The goal of this wave is to “join camps, activities, people and learning in this effort to support Haiti” and to do it “synchronously and in real time.” The wave is sort of a portal to other wave discussions about Haiti and a list of resources for providing relief, giving support, finding people, and some videos with news updates.

Emergency Management Wave – This wave has a good conversation going of how Google Wave can be used as a tool for emergency management and disaster response. There are some good ideas floating around. One idea I particularly liked was using the maps gadget to create a “situation map” of the disaster area that allows people with different responsibilities to update it from their perspective.

Master List of Help Haiti Waves – This wave is simply a compiled list of all the waves dedicated to Haiti.

Do you see Google Wave as being a very useful platform and piece of technology for emergency management and disaster response?

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.

Here’s how all of this helps Google Wave though: goo.gl works with the Google Toolbar. That means it won’t be long before it works with Google Wave too. This is important because Wave already generates monolithic URLs that only a computer programmer could appreciate.

In sum, this means that, if goo.gl is integrated with Wave, nicer and shorter URLs will be generated to waves. This means people can Tweet about what their waving. Bingo!

Instead of Google eliminating Twitter altogether, they decided to take the back door in and effectively replace tweets with links to waves.

We’ll find out what the fullest extent of goo.gl means together…

Aaron Iba, CEO of AppJet, wrote:

We have begun planning how to open source the code to EtherPad and the underlying AppJet Web Framework. We will continue maintaining new pad creation from the EtherPad home page at least until we have open sourced the code, and work hard to make sure there will be no or minimal service disruption in the future.

Iba continued by saying that, although Wave isn’t as mature as EtherPad, he is confident that EtherPad users will be satisfied with Google Wave as development continues.

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.

It’s not a surprise that Google Wave would choose to team up with AppJet. Their product EtherPad has proven to be a very successful web-based, online collaboration tool. So much so that they’ve been able to charge their users $8 per month.

However, EtherPad customers aren’t so happy about this acquisition. In fact, with a quick glance over the comments at the EtherPad blog, the majority of customers are pretty pissed about this new partnership.

One EtherPad user writes:

C’mon Google, I am a big supporter but at least give us till the end of the year to publish new pads … this is way to abrupt and sudden, I was just showing people yesterday how easy and great this product was!!

Because Google Wave has built a reputation for being hard to understand, I think current EtherPad users are afraid the easy functionality that set apart EtherPad from other competitors will be lost in Google Wave.

It is a little scary to think that Google bought out one of it’s only large competitors. However, hopefully some of the beauty and functionality of EtherPad will be brought into Google Wave for a better product. We all know Google Wave is pretty rough around the edges at the present moment.

How do you feel about Google’s acquisition of AppJet?

Well, he finally did. And didn’t change his opinion:

So now that I’ve tried Wave, do I expect it to kill email? No. The reason that nothing is going to kill email anytime soon is quite simple: email is universal (or as close to it as anything on the Internet). Email has all kinds of problems and I often hate it, but the fact is that it mostly works, and there’s a huge amount of experience and infrastructure supporting it. The best we can do is to use email less, and tools like Wave and Docs are a big help here.

What’s particularly interesting to note is that he continued and said, “I don’t know what Google has planned for Wave or Gmail, but if I were them I would continue improving Wave, and then once it’s ready for the whole world to use, integrate it into Gmail.”

He didn’t expound upon what an integrated Gmail and Wave would look like.

It’s pretty obvious that Google Wave radically changes how we communicate and is, due to such newness, hard to understand by some. Based on what we’ve seen from Wave so far, it’s basically everything that email isn’t. What we’ve known are static emails; now, through Wave, we have live documents.

Even though Wave is still under heavy development and will be continually refined, would it be possible to integrate two opposites with stark differences? Of course, we can always settle for the happy medium, but what does that mean? We’d get halfway dynamic documents? Or would we just send the “gadgets” idea over to Gmail and lose real-time collaboration (Buchiet commented that real-time collaboration is “problematic”)?

Sure, Wave won’t probably replace email in the near future. And it needs work (a lot, actually). But a possible Gmail/Wave cross might lose many of the unique characteristics of Wave.