Share your Google Wave stories

We love getting messages like these:

"Just thought I'd share a quick story. Was out with a friend last night who is looking for a new apartment with another friend of ours who lives in San Diego. I'd invited both of them to try Google Wave and they said that using it to look for an apartment was a both a gamechanger and a lifesaver! My friend Eric said he cringed at the thought of all the emailing of links, trying to remember which one they liked, etc had they not had Wave. The ability to insert all the links into one wave, leave comments or chat in realtime and clean up as well as go back totally has them both hooked!"

"I used Google Wave to conduct an interview. We did the whole thing in a wave and it worked brilliantly--we could answer questions as he asked them so the pace of the conversation moved really quickly, and we had a record of the whole thing."

"I just had my big wave "aha!" moment. After ~3 weeks of using it, I went to compose an e-mail and found it totally strange that I couldn't have people collaborate with me on my e-mail. Want: collaboration everywhere!"

Have you used Google Wave in an interesting way? We're excited to hear your stories, so if you have one you'd like to share, here's how to let us know:

Share great waves
If you have a cool wave that came together really nicely, add wave.stories@googlewave.com as a participant.

Tell us about a wave 'a-ha' moment
Write a quick description (in a wave) of how using Google Wave helped you out and add wave.stories@googlewave.com to it. Or wave us with a link to a blogpost about interesting examples, like how it was used for international debates.

We won't respond or edit your content, just act like a fly on the wall (and maybe use playback to see how it came together). Down the road, we might feature your story on our blog.

Thanks again to all who are trying the preview, and happy waving!

Posted by Stephanie Hannon, Product Manager, Google Wave

Waving with groups

Some users have noticed that we have the beginnings of support for groups in Google Wave, so we figured we'd give everyone a quick explanation of how it currently works. Keep in mind that this is in the very early stages and we have much better functionality planned for the future, but feel free to try it out!

Currently, you can add a Google Group to a wave, set permissions and then view and edit waves with that group. Unlike other group conversations, however, group waves will only show up in Google Wave, not in the Google Groups interface.

Here are the detailed steps for how to do it:

Step 1: Create a Google Group
When creating a group, note that most of the settings of Google Groups are respected; for instance, if the group is set to allow anyone to view content, anyone may view that wave. You will have to add Google Wave users into your group with their username@gmail.com address (we're in the process of getting username@googlewave.com working, too). Under the 'Appearance' setting, chose an image that will help you identify your group in Google Wave. Learn more about how groups settings work with Google Wave.

If you already have a Google Group, you're ready to go.

Step 2: Add your new group into your contact list
Click the '+' button in the lower right corner of the contacts panel, type in the name of the group (including @googlegroups.com) and hit 'Submit'.



Step 3: Add the group to a wave
This works just like any of your other contacts.

Step 4: Find waves with your group
You can do this either by clicking on the group's contact and then on the "Group Waves" button or by searching for "group:groupname@googlegroups.com". If you'd like to create a quick shortcut to get to these, try saving your search! Find information on more group searches in our Help Center.



Step 5: Follow group waves!
We recently launched the ability to follow waves. You will not be automatically following group waves, so use the follow feature to make them appear in your inbox when they're updated.

This is just the beginning for groups. In the future, you'll have a groups option in your Navigation panel that will help you find and follow group waves. We'd love to hear your thoughts, let us know what you think on our Help Forum.

Posted by Jan Vaughan, Software engineer, Google Wave Team

A million stamps licked ... and counting

As we wrote in our last post, our users' top feature request is "more invitations." We've been working to increase the capacity of our preview setup and have sent invitations to everyone who requested an invite through our online form. If you'd like to request an invitation, you can still sign up here.

We've also given existing users additional invitations to share with family, friends, and colleagues. If you know people who want to try out Google Wave during the preview, log in and help them out!



Although we are opening up access a bit, do remember that Google Wave is still only in its early preview phase (read more about what that means). If you are interested in developing with the Google Wave APIs and would like an account on the developer sandbox, you can request one here.

Finally, there are a few sites and even public waves that offer invitations to Google Wave in exchange for email addresses or promotions (on Twitter, for example). You should always be careful about sharing your email address or other personal information and remember that Google Wave is free so you should never have to pay for an invitation, either. So, instead of using a public site or forum, please sign up on our form and we'll send you an invitation.

Happy waving and thank you so much for all the both encouraging and critical feedback we have received so far!

Posted by Grim Iversen, Product Manager, Google Wave

Your thoughts on waving so far

We're thankful that so many people have been willing to try out Google Wave in a host of different areas: personal, business, government, education and even not-for-profit. We've been glad to see positive responses, especially since we're still in a limited preview and not quite ready to give accounts to everyone who has requested one.

Since we can't talk to all of our users individually (no matter how hard we try!), we've been running an online survey to get some feedback on the Google Wave experience. We distributed the survey through email (to a random sample of those that volunteered to help), a link in our help center and a tweet. While this may not be a completely representative sample of all Google Wave users, the results have been interesting to us, and we'd like to share them. Here's a quick overview of what Wavers have said so far.

What Wavers like most



The wave itself: The concept of a wave as a central place to communicate and collaborate is what people say they like the most.

One place to discuss and work together: The next most popular is the ability to use Google Wave to work together and integrate messages and documents; many respondents have indicated that existing methods and tools don't meet all of their needs.

Extensions: Close behind the collaboration features, survey respondents liked the ability to extend Google Wave's functionality through gadgets and robots.

What Wavers don't like



Invitations: The biggest request so far has been for more invitations to wave with friends and colleagues. We understand it's hard to communicate and collaborate if you have no contacts so we're working hard to make Google Wave scale to a large number of users.

Integration with other tools: People want Google Wave to be more integrated with their existing tools, like email. They also want to be notified when they get a new wave as their current collaboration processes are built around email, instant messaging and other similar systems.

Speed: The next largest issue has been about the speed of the system - people stated that sometimes it is too slow.

What we're doing with the feedback

With these responses and other data, we're organizing our team around the core issues that are important to making waving better. We're working hard to scale our systems so you can invite your friends and colleagues to wave with you. We're also thinking about how to integrate with existing communication and collaboration tools. And since we all know that fast is better than slow, a large portion of the team is working to make Google Wave faster.

Let us know how we're going with these things and if you are waving feel free to take the survey again and again -- we're interested in seeing how people use Google Wave differently over time. We'll start writing about what people are actually doing with waves, so let us know about interesting things you've tried.

Happy waving!

Posted by Aaron Cheang, User Experience Researcher, Google Wave

Follow your waves

We've received lots of feedback from Wavers that the public waves they read were clogging up their inboxes. Today, we've introduced a new concept to Google Wave--"following" waves. Now, clicking on a public wave no longer causes it to appear (and stay) in your inbox; you have to explicitly choose to "follow" the wave.

Here's how following works: When someone adds you directly to a wave, or if you contribute to a wave, you will automatically be following that wave. When you see a public wave that you would like to get updates on, you can chose to follow it by hitting the follow button in the wave panel toolbar. You can remove these waves from your inbox by hitting the "archive" button, but when there is an update they will pop back in. You can switch between following and unfollowing a wave as much and as often as you like.

Public waves that are in your inbox simply because you opened them at some point in the past will start to leave your inbox as they get updated. You can also manually remove them with the "archive" feature, and they will no longer return. We hope this will help with clearing a backlog of unwanted waves.

Please note that the new "unfollow" feature replaces mute. If you no longer want a wave you are on for any reason (whether you created it, added to it or followed it), to show up in your inbox, use "unfollow". You can still find waves that you are not following by searching for them or if you have organized them into saved searches or folders.

Following is the first step towards a set of new tools for managing waves in your inbox. In the future, there will be more control over what kinds of changes will cause a wave to appear in your inbox, and we will soon introduce better support for groups of wave users. We're also thinking of expanding the following concept to let you follow people, groups, and searches. In the meantime, let us know what you think of following, check out some other ways to organize your inbox and share your own #wavetips on Twitter.

Happy following!

Posted by Casey Whitelaw, Engineering tech lead, Google Wave

Waving hello!

Since we started to expand the Google Wave preview, we've seen lots of interesting and creative responses from users from animation to song to even a dance remix of the keynote at Google IO (below). We've also gotten a ton of questions about features and availability that we'd like to continue to address.



Today, we're starting this blog to let you know what is going on with the product, share interesting use cases and talk about what you can look forward to in the future with Google Wave. You might have noticed that we've also started a Twitter account, for quick updates and 'tips and tricks' but for the times that 140 characters is not quite enough, we'll post here. The Google Wave Developer Blog will remain the place for technical news on the protocol and platform and upcoming developer events.

We want to keep hearing from you, so let us know if you have any feedback on this blog and on Google Wave in general. And keep that awesome creativity coming!

Posted by Anna-Christina Douglas, Product Marketing, Google Wave