15 Aug 2009, Posted by christie in Blogging Bytes, 32 Comments

How Google Wave is going to change your life – and maybe your blog

Google says that Google Wave will be available to the public in just a few more months. So far there is no definite date, but some lucky people are getting to participate in the development sandbox right now. Google Wave will be open source, because they need developers to contribute to it and think of more cool stuff to do with it – and developers are still being granted access to the Sandbox, if you’d like to apply.

Now instead of the emails we write and send back and forth, a conversation in Google Wave is a shared object hosted on a server somewhere. You can add whatever friends you want to a conversation, and when they open the wave themselves they will see messages you have written to them. You can add text, pictures, videos, maps, and other types of items to a wave and change the content at any time. Currently, when we write regular old emails to each other, we have to reply to the whole thing in some way, by inserting our responses in between the original message, or by just putting our response in some sort of order. With Google Wave, you can have server split a message apart so you respond to one sentence on its own, if you like. If the other person’s wave is open while you’re typing, they actually see the characters appear! You can be formulating your own reply while you’re reading their typing, instead of just waiting around wondering what the heck is taking so long (like when in IM you see that the other person “is typing a message.” This feature is thought to speed up conversation! But gee, maybe I don’t want someone looking “over my shoulder” while I type! Sometimes I might like to have a rough draft before I send. Apparently a lot of people feel that way, so they are adding a box you can check if you don’t want anyone to see what you’re typing until you hit the Done button. Also, if you add a new user to your conversation after some of it has already taken place, the new user is able to use the Playback button to see the history – actually read each entry and response in order. And although a conversation might get full of people, it is easy to create a private reply that only a chosen one or few can see. When you do that, you just drag in only the users you want.

Federation is supported using the Google Wave Federation Protocol, so any institution will be able to develop Wave services, give accounts to their users, and then still be able to talk to people on other Wave services and the Google Waveservice. They’ll still get live character by character messages just like the rest of us, even if they have developed their own user interface. This should be very valuable for collaboration – think of researchers in different universities or other institutions, all able to talk to each other in a wave, using the authentication of their home institution and adding others from other Wave systems as needed.

Now most importantly to me – if I want to display a wave on my blog, how will I do it? Fortunately there’s already at least one WordPress plugin available! The author states that is is easy to use; you just have to put the ID of the wave in there. This plugin has been updated to feature a TinyMCE button for embedding the wave. Just click on the button and it will show you a prompt where you can enter the wave id and other parameters. The Wavr plugin implements the full wave embed api. In the near future, it is planned to include widgets for the sidebar! To find the WaveID of the wave you want, open it on Google Wave and click on Debug – Get Current Wave ID. Make sure you use the full wave id (something like wavesandbox.com!w+MNJWKLNa%A).

I can’t wait to get my hands on Google Wave, and as soon as I do, I promise a much more detailed review – or hopefully a Sandbox Wave of our own here at MiscBytes! Then all I will need is the hugest monitor I can get, because I’ll soon be addicted to Google Wave and want to keep an eye on it no matter what else I’m doing around the house. How about you? Do you see yourself getting deeply into Google Wave and adding it to your blog?