How to Create a Public Wave in Google Wave

As a new waver, one of the first things you might have done was search for public waves to join in and participate. A public wave is a wave that is open for anyone to join. Some are dedicated to listing your favorite recipes, others in order to play a public game of Sudoku and then others are created for intense philosophical and theological debate.

You too can create a public wave for people to join in on. It’s really easy to create your own public wave.

How do you create a public wave?

Unfortunately, when you create a new wave, there isn’t an option to make your wave public. In order to make a wave public, you need to designate it to Wave’s public server. Here’s how you do that.

First, you’ll need to add “public@a.gwave.com” to your contacts list.

It’s quite possible that Google Wave will say that the “User does not have a Google Wave account.” Simply ignore this and press enter and “public@a.gwave.com” should be added to your contacts list.

All you do now is add “public@a.gwave.com” to a wave and your wave will be public.

As you can see, my newly created public wave shows up at the top of all the other public waves.

It’s quite possible that if you logout of Wave or switch computers that you’ll have to re-add “public@a.gwave.com” back to your contacts list.

A word of warning though! For obvious reasons, public waves are open to anyone. Because of this some newbies will add bots (usually out of ignorance) which will end up destroying the wave. This can end up clogging up the wave and disorganizing it in such a way that makes it unrecoverable.

Overall, it’s fun to be able to connect with other wavers in public waves, especially if you are new and don’t have any personal contacts on wave yet.