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 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.