Ten tips for waving

Here's a quick snapshot of some our favorite tips that you may or may not have noticed yet. Give them a try, and if you aren't using Google Wave yet, you can request an invitation.

Double click!

You can edit or reply to any part of a wave by double clicking on it.

Use 'Shift + Enter'
Submit and create new replies with 'Shift+Enter' to make a conversation go faster.

Hit spacebar

Move through the unread messages in a wave by pressing the spacebar.

Edit your profile

Give yourself a picture instead of a grey head. Click on your name in the Contacts panel.

Link to another wave

Create a link to another wave by dragging it over from the search panel while you're editing.

Make a wave public

Share a wave with the world. Add public@a.gwave.com to your contacts, then to the wave. Then, click on the contact at the top to make it read-only.

Follow a wave

If you want to see it in your inbox, click "Follow". "Unfollow", if you don't.

Add a search result

Use the G+ gadget on the editing toolbar to add a link, image or video to your wave

Filter your waves

Create saved searches by clicking the '+' next to SEARCHES in the Navigation panel. Add color coding, too!

Open multiple waves at once

Hold 'Ctrl' and click on a wave in the search panel to open waves side by side.

We also post tips on Twitter, so follow @googlewave and share your own #wavetips, too!

Happy waving!

Posted by Anna-Christina Douglas, Google Wave Team

Radio waving

Last week, Dennis Elliot at Clear Channel in Greensboro, North Carolina added wave.stories@googlewave.com to a wave which we'd love to share here on the blog.

Just wanted to tell you guys that we are loving the wave here at Clear Channel Radio in Greensboro NC where we have 5 FM radio stations.

We have just started using it and only have a small number of our staff on it right now, but we plan on expanding it to everyone as soon as possible.

It has made projects which are very detailed and require a lot of back and forth input and discussion from several people much easier to do.

As an example, I am adding you to a wave called Big Game Home Invasion. This is an on air and on line promotion involving two clients. Plus we needed to have input on putting it together from two sales people, the sales manager, the station program director, the station promotions director, the online content coordinator and me, the online content director.


Without a wave, we would have had to resort to numerous back and forth e-mails, sending graphics files to each other for approval, having people go from office to office to see updates and answer questions and lots of time tracking people down by phone. Instead, we did the entire project in wave in just a fraction of the amount of time it would normally have taken. In fact, you will see a comment by Jennifer near the bottom of the wave where she says she is seriously crying at her desk. She is referring to the fact that we got through this project in just a fraction of the time it would normally have taken and without a lot of the hassles we normally have in something like this.

Thanks for the news, Dennis, and keep those wave stories coming!

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

Creating software and superheroes: Google waving with Lyn And Line

When we heard that Caroline Dahllöf and Carolyn Uy, Lyn And Line founders and creators of The Rescue of Ginger, use Google Wave almost exclusively for their business, we asked them to write a post about it. Here's how they use waves to create educational story apps (about superheroes, no less!) for kids between the ages of 2 and 5 for the Android and iPhone platforms.



We're a small software company -- just two people. But we live in two different countries, on two different continents, more than 8500 kilometers apart with a time difference of nine hours. Communication for us is a little more complicated than just yelling across the room whenever we need to discuss something. Since a good part of our working day takes place while the other is sleeping, we have to put in a little extra effort to keep each other informed.

We started using Google Wave to organize our conversations. We set up waves for all the things that we need to discuss. For example, to keep each other informed of source code changes, we created a wave where we add blips for what we changed in our code. We have another wave for tracking our bugs. And we even added our testers to that wave, so they could add bugs they found. This made it easy for everyone to see what needed to be fixed. We have a wave for the next story we are writing, where we can add, edit, or comment on each other’s ideas. We have a wave for people we need to contact. This list goes on and on. For anything that is on-going that we need to keep each other up to date on, we set up a wave.

Because we can have mini conversations inside of our waves, we can keep all of the information pertaining to a particular subject contained inside a single wave. And unlike the clutter of emails that gets saved in some folder, blips of information can be added to a particular wave wherever we need them to keep the conversation flowing and organized.



The beauty of this organization is that every morning, we can look at our inboxes and get a quick overview of what the other person has been doing. Because Google Wave notifies us when there is a change, there is no need for an extra email summarizing what has happened. And there is no need tell the other person, “Make sure you look at XYZ.” Having all of our conversations in different waves has made it easy for us to stay informed despite the distance and time difference.


Contact us at lynandline@googlewave.com .

Posted by Caroline Dahllöf and Carolyn Uy, Lyn And Line