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?

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. One, to add these extensions, I was usually required to jump through a several step process in order to add them in a Wave. Or two, I would have add some random URL that I’d have to be able to remember and recall to the “Gadget URL” within a wave, or add the particular extension’s bot as a contact. And three, I had no idea how to determine the quality of a particular extension since I was relying on a third party website for information about the extension.

Five Criteria for Extension Developers

So the extension gallery is a step towards organizing these extensions and maintaing a reasonable level of quality and functionality. When it comes to designing an extension, there are five criteria developers must meet, which I will summarize, as described in the Google Wave API’s documentation.

1.) Make it Wave-y. Wave is a real-time, collaborative tool, so extensions should be created around this purpose. This means that extensions should encourage and receive participation from all individuals within a wave.

2.) Make it easy to use. Wave inevitably creates a unique learning curve because the technology is so different than what most users are used to. This is why extensions should be very easy to understand without the need for a lengthy set of instructions. An extension should be as intuitive to use as possible.

3.) Make it easy to install. Earlier I complained about how some extensions require you to enter in a gadget URL. Ideally, developers should be creating extensions that use an extension installer. An extension installer allows the user to install an extension which can then be accessed from the New Wave menu or from a wave’s toolbar. This eliminates the need to “Add a Gadget by URL.”

4.) Make it look good. This one might be pretty self-explanatory, but extensions should compliment the visual experience of Google Wave. An extension that looks like it belongs within the Wave interface makes the user experience a lot more comfortable and seamless.

5.) Make it useful or fun. Ultimately, extensions should help users collaborate more effectively and efficiently, or it should at least be fun to use (e.g. crossword puzzle, sudoku, etc.).

How to Submit Your Extension into the Gallery

If you have developed an extension and want to submit it into the gallery, you can submit it for consideration. It’s quite easy.

First, install the Submitty Extension.

After you’ve installed Submitty, select the “New Extension Submission” from the “New Wave” menu.

Lastly, fill out the information and instructions in the wave. Once, you’ve done this it’ll be able to be shared for review and consideration into the extension gallery.

Images used from: http://code.google.com/apis/wave/submitextension.html

What about a review system?

As the extension gallery grows, I could see the need for an extension review feature. When you get several different variants off of the Napkin extension, you’re going to want to know which drawing board is the best to use. A review system also allows developers to get feedback from those using their extensions. This would inevitably encourage developers to continue to make the best extensions in the gallery.

Overall, I’m excited to see the organization and quality control that the extension gallery brings. Hopefully this will continue to open the doors for well-developed extensions.

So far, what are your favorite extensions in the gallery?

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.

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.

Pros

1.) Wave really is extraordinary collaborating in a live document. I know this might be a bit obvious because this is just what Wave does, but after using Wave in a serious context, rather than just clicking around for fun, I saw how extraordinarily powerful it is to see everyone’s thoughts and ideas transpiring in real-time. This allows all the participants of a wave to give instant feedback.

2.) The entire process is sped up. I am not even kidding you, after having brainstormed and processed the results of our survey, we had written 10 pages worth of content for our paper within a matter of an hour. I think this was largely due to the fact that we did not have to wait for the latest revision of the document in order to contribute more to the paper. Whenever you had an idea, you could instantly contribute.

3.) There was ownership for everyone involved. One of the concerns when doing a group project is that the responsibility of the project falls onto one person. Because the group paper was accessible by anyone at anytime, we could all play an equal part in the process. We did find it helpful to assign someone as having a primary editing role for making sure the paper transitioned smoothly and displayed consistency, but even so, others can be involved in that process as well.

4.) Playback is really nice. When you have six people contributing to a wave, it isn’t long before the Wave fills up with a lot of information. While this is important for the brainstorming process, eventually, you want to delete the parts of the Wave you don’t need anymore. The good news is that the history of your wave is recorded and can be restored from any point. So we were able to take a lot of liberties deleting the “extras” we didn’t need anymore. In the final editing process, there were times where I wanted to go back, and this was relatively easy with just a few clicks.

5.) Indented replies are useful. We tried to separate our paper up into as many small blips as we could, so people could reply to those individual blips with any thoughts or reflection, rather than replying to a massive section. However, we didn’t do the best job at dividing our paper up into blips as we hoped. This was partly because we didn’t know how to insert a new blip above a blip. After the paper, we noticed if you click on the top right corner of a blip and select “Insert Above” you get another blip that isn’t indented. I wish we would have noticed this sooner!

Cons (or Suggestions)

I hesitate calling this a list of “Cons” because it might be better called a wish-list or simply some suggestions. Some of these things might seem a bit picky, but these are some features that I thought might be helpful, especially in a more academic setting, after having walked through this process.

1.) What about footnotes? Through college, I’ve been accustomed to using footnotes for citations and any extraneous notes that are worth mentioning for papers. So if you are hoping to use Chicago style citations you’ll be out of luck.

While it wasn’t a problem to format our citations in MLA, we did find ourselves wishing we could throw in a footnote. If we wanted to use footnotes, we would have to write the whole paper, then cut and paste the paper from Google Wave into Microsoft Word to add in the necessary footnotes. Who wants to do that?

Even if there wasn’t a footnote feature that was as seamless as Word’s, it would still be nice to have a superscript and subscript formatting option on the toolbar. This way, we could at least manually add in any footnotes or citations if we pleased. This definitely didn’t make or break the project, but we were bumming out.

2.) Drag and drop blips? At times, it was a bit tedious to clean-up the wave to prevent it from becoming too messy. Ideally, we wanted to have as many blips in the paper, so we could add an indented reply to those small sections of the paper. Because we were doing six different inter-related sections, in the editing process, we ended up moving these sections around quite a bit within the paper. I could have seen it be helpful to be able to simply drag a blip and move it to a different spot in the wave.

We simply cut and pasted the content in order to move it, but it might be cool to have some drag and drop functionality to wave.

3.) I wish Wave were faster. Different members in the group experienced some inconsistency with the overall speed of Google Wave. Of course the speed of the internet will play factor into this, but it seemed at times like the browser couldn’t always handle wave from an application standpoint. I noticed those that were trying to run Wave in Firefox or Safari generally had a much more laggier experience than those running Google Wave in Chrome. It makes sense why Wave would run faster in the Chrome browser (Google develops Chrome), but it would be nice if I could use Safari too without it crashing my browser.

4.) The experience was sometimes a bit chaotic. It is easy to get lost in a wave once you start throwing out ideas and replying to different blips. One thing our group had to remember was that Wave does not organize your content for you. We all had to be very intentional about creating lists, separating blips, and deleting the unneeded parts of the wave. It might be cool if Wave included a table of contents feature, much like a wiki, where you can create a table of contents at the beginning of the wave, and those sections linked to parts deeper in the wave.

5.) Any final formatting had to be done in Microsoft Word. We were able to do the bulk of writing the paper in Wave, but getting it into a format that we could print out and turn in to our professor required us to use Microsoft Word (e.g. headings, page numbers, double spacing, citations, etc.). I could almost see use for a feature that would allow you to export a Wave into a .doc file or into Google Docs. This would allow you to the put the finishing touches on whatever you create in Wave for presentation’s sake.

Conclusion

Google Wave shows some real potential for using it in the academic setting. It can be a great platform for discussion among colleagues and for working on projects. Again, as Google Wave is still in preview, it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely something to test out and experiment with. I had no idea going into the project if Wave would be able to do what we would need it to do. However, throughout the process, a lot of us in the group kept affirming that Wave really did make things a lot easier for us. If you’re a professor, you might want to consider using it for your classes.

The biggest thing in this process was that we didn’t have to worry about having the latest document version. The latest updated version of our research paper was right in the Wave, so anyone could add, subtract, or modify it at anytime. If you’re thinking about using Wave in an academic setting, it’s definitely worth the try.

I welcome any questions or comments about my group’s experience with using Google Wave in the academic setting. Please post them below.

About the Author

Brett is a website developer and the founder and editor of gwTips. In his spare time, he enjoys playing guitar. You can visit his website to learn how you can teach yourself guitar with online guitar lessons.

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:

1.) Lay Out Specific Rules and Guidelines

Everyone in my group had not used Google Wave before, so I quickly sent out invites after we received the assignment to get everyone signed up. There’s a particular novelty about Wave when you first get invited. You want to click around and give it a test drive.

This curiosity is all good, but for this project, I created the project wave, and at the beginning of the wave I not only welcomed everyone to the wave, but explained some goals for the wave, some guidelines, and some tips for new users. In the goals section, I wanted to answer: what’s the purpose of the wave? what’s desired from each participant? In the guidelines, I wanted to emphasis the importance of staying on topic, cleaning up the wave if needed, and advise against certain gadgets and extensions.

These rules or guidelines are pretty simple but I found that creating some focus to the wave helped everyone stay on topic, contribute, and have a productive conversation.

2.) Consider Meeting in the Same [Physical] Room

Our first group meeting met for a brainstorming section all circled up in a conference room in the library with each of us with our laptops logged into Wave. Now, I know Wave is set up to simulate the feeling that the conversation is live, but there was nothing quite like waving in the same room. We could not only add our ideas to the wave, but we could also openly discuss these ideas in the same room. We were not only interacting with ideas in a verbal way but we’re also seeing what we’re discussing on “paper.” There will never be anything like a face-to-face conversation; you can discuss more and cover more in a shorter period of time, but combining face-to-face with Wave was doubly powerful.

At the end of the meeting, we were also able to give everyone individual work going separately from the meeting. One person was responsible for developing and explaining one point while the other person had to do another and so on. Obviously, the beauty of doing this with Wave was that we could see this other person’s revisions while we are making our own revisions.

3.) There’s No Such Thing as a Bad Idea

As much as Google Wave is an information tool, it is also very much a creative tool. During our brainstorming meeting, we had to come up with ideas for research questions. All of our fields of study are far from research (for example, mine is music), so a lot of us knew hardly anything about crafting a good and effective research question.

We found it was extremely important to emphasize (even in the rules and guidelines) there’s no such thing as a bad idea. We wanted everyone to throw out and add to the wave whatever idea or question came to their mind even if it ended up being an useable question. Creativity is best fostered in a setting of openness. Even if you throw out a “bad idea,” this bad idea could lead someone to another idea, which leads to another idea, and so-on. There’s a refining process and this process never happens if no one is willing to take a risk.

4.) Separate Content as Much as Possible Into Blips

In all of our brainstorming and writing, it was really easy to quickly fill up a wave with a TON of information. It was also really easy to collect all of this information into only one blip. After awhile, the wave can become really hard on the eyes to look at. This became a big problem.

It’s important that you are always doing cleanup. Try to divide your content up into the smallest blips as possible in a way that makes sense. This way it’s easier to respond to an individual piece of content because it’s in its own blip rather than apart of a 1000-word blip.

Delete things you don’t need anymore. Remember the history of your wave is saved, so if you happen to need something you deleted, just go back and get it. Use bold, italics, underlining, highlighting, and heading tags in the best way possible to format your wave in a way that makes sense and is easy to follow.

5.) Experiment

Every group’s workflow is going to be a little bit different. You’ll have to see what works best for you and the type of project you are working on. Google Wave is a tool with many different possibilities for its use. There’s not necessarily one way to use it.

If you are a college professor, I would really recommend trying out Google Wave the next time you have your students do a group paper or something similar. It’s amazing how fast the work process is sped up (once you get the hang of it of course), and I found that a lot more ideas have the ability to come out since Google Wave gives you an easier way to voice these ideas.

I’ve done group papers for other classes and we’ll have to do it all in a Microsoft Word document and pass that through email one at a time so we can then each individually add our revisions and updates. And while on a Word document, our revisions can show up from each individual, before you can add anything more to the conversation, you have to wait till you have the latest version of the Word document from someone else. There is a lot of waiting with this process, whereas with Google Wave, you can start adding something as soon as the idea crosses your mind.

Right now, in our group project, we are beyond the brainstorming process and we’re starting to write the actual paper. It’s interesting to me also how fast we can write it when we are all working on it at the same time, in the same room, and verbally bouncing ideas off of each other. We were able to pound out a couple really quality pages in only a matter of minutes because we had discussed it and as we were writing it we could each give input into what was being written.

Have you used Google Wave yet in the academic setting or in a similar setting? What has been your experience?

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.

My own experience with using it has been fairly negative. One, it seems to slow down the wave even more so once the wave grows in size. Also, sometimes I’ve used Aunt Rosie and had my translation appear 30+ times below the blip. I don’t know if the creator of this app has fixed this problem or if it’s a problem on my end. I’m not sure what causes it. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.

“Translatey” Translation Bot

Translatey will translate your text from any language to the language you choose. You can add the Translatey bot to a wave by adding “translatey@appspot.com” as a participant to the wave. Once you do, a blip will appear with some instructions.

I responded to the blip with “/?” to get help. A list of language codes came up. You’ll see that each language is represented with a two character language code (e.g. Spanish = “es”).

I responded to this blip with “es” to designate that I want to translate into Spanish. This will translate any language I type in (English, German, French, etc.).

The cool thing about Translatey is that it automatically detects what language you are typing in. Another potential plus for some users is that later on you can change the language you want to translate into by just entering a new language code in a replying blip. For example, you could translate one blip into Dutch and then translate another blip into French.

One downside to some might be the fact that it doesn’t translate in realtime. In order for it to translate a blip, you must write the blip and then hit the hotkey “Shift + Enter” or hit the “Done” button. Then, a replying blip will translate the language.

“Multilingual” Translation Bot

The Multilingual translation bot works similarly to Translatey, but I found it has quite a few more options. You can add the Multilingual bot to a wave by adding “multilingual@appspot.com” as a participant to a wave. Once you do, a blip will appear with some not-so-helpful information.

If you reply to this blip by just typing in “/help” another blip will pop up with some helpful instructions.

You’ll notice with Multilingual you’ll have a lot more command options:

# Type /version to show the last version of Multilingual Bot

# Type /userlist to show registered user

# Type /lang_id /lang_id anywhere, your text will be translated to selected language, example: /en /de your text

# Type /notranslate anywhere, the bot will not translate your text

# Type lang_id to register your language, example for english: en

# Or just type your text, your language will be detected and translated to all registered language

Multilingual works a little bit differently. Rather than selecting a language to translate into, Multilingual automatically detects the language you are typing in and then will translate that into the registered language of each participant in the wave.

For example, if I register my language as English by typing in an empty blip “en,” the message of someone who types something in Spanish (or any other language) will be translated to me into English because that’s my registered language. If someone’s registered language was German, that message in Spanish would be translated to them in German.

This is an excellent feature that can be utilized multi-language waves. Hence the name: “Multilingual.”

Conclusion

Out of these three translation bots, I’ve had the best experience with Multilingual. I was a bit confused at first with the initial Multilingual blip that comes up, but simply typing in “/help” really, well, helps. I like the simplicity of it (e.g. not translating in realtime) and I also like the added options and commands that come with it. It’s also pretty nifty how it’ll automatically detect the language being typed and translate that to participants in the wave depending upon their registered language.

Have you tried these translation bots? Which one is your favorite to use?

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!

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

Originally, I got this idea from Bob Kauflin, in a post about a large collaborative songwriting project he did with his church music team. 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 ends up simplifying this back and forth process a bit easier. Plus, it’s helpful to be able to playback the wave to see what revisions were made and the original copies of the song. Songwriting has become a great way to use Google Wave.

2.) Emergency management and response

I hadn’t really thought of this until the tragic Haiti earthquake. This has prompted discussion on how Google Wave can be used as a tool to coordinate a rapid response to a natural disaster.

For example, one idea is that people could make updates on the map gadget with information from their point of view or any needs in that area. Google Wave might not be “beefy” enough to handle something on such a large scale like the Haiti earthquake. Right now, for the situation in Haiti, a lot of people are just using Wave to post information about the earthquake and how people can respond to it.

I imagine that even a smaller scale one way you could use Google Wave is to coordinate responses in your own community for volunteer projects or community service projects.

3.) Overseas business meetings

This was my girlfriend’s idea. She works with an advertising company that works pretty closely with Google and occasionally has to work with clients that are overseas. In this case, Google Wave allows you to collaborate instantaneously over long distances and not have to worry about communication barriers with the help of Aunt Rosy the translation bot and other tools.

If you wanted to, you could add voice chat into the wave conversation too. For example, Ribbit has created an app that can do this, and I’m sure many other companies and developers will be following suit too in the future.

4.) Planning your next family event

What about using wave to plan your next big family reunion and get together? For families that are spread out across the country, this might be a good option.

Simply add all your family members to the conversation and they’ll be able to confirm, give an estimated time of arrival, make plans, let each other know who will bring the casserole, make a map of the location, and any other detail you might need to discuss.

5.) Writing an academic paper

In my last year of college, with a group of two other people, we had to write a lengthy group paper in response to a case study dealing with a controversial ethical issue. Because the issue was so controversial, we had different opinions and views going into the paper. So it was hard to try to get all of our ideas and thoughts out on the table and then try to organize them in a paper. It was quite a pain to try to have to update a Word document with your ideas, save it, send the most recent version in an email to my group partners, and then make sure only one person is working on the document at a time.

All to say, if Google Wave were out then, our project would have went a lot quicker. I expect and would hope to see Google Wave being used more in academia.

6.) Plan a group trip

Say you’re going on a trip with three of your other close friends. You can’t decide where you want to go or when you want to go. You can use Google Wave as a way to share trip ideas, share pictures of locations, make a map and put some markers on it of places you want to visit, and make your very last minute plans.

You could even do this one in combination with planning your next family event.

7.) Coding

My Waver friend David Cook has been raving about using Google Wave for coding on his blog recently. While I personally haven’t tried it out, he swears it to be the best use for Google Wave right now. If you’re looking to give it a try yourself, Syntaxy is an extension that does syntax highlight for a variety of programming languages.

This is just a start. What are your ideas for using Google Wave or what ways have you used Google Wave?

Go ahead. Don’t be shy. Share them with us.

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?