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