Try out new Google Wave wave notifications!

We know that one painpoint for people using Google Wave is that sometimes they don't know when others are trying to wave with them or whether anyone has responded to their waves. In designing notifications, we realized that people use lots of different tools on the web, but one system that is compatible with everyone is the physical world. So, today we are excited to roll out an early preview of Google Wave wave notifications.

You can enable Google Wave wave notifications through the drop down menu that appears when you mouse over the Inbox link in the Navigation panel.



You can set the volume for your notifications to Silent, Medium, Loud or Vibrate and pick your preferred notifier. We look forward to offering more advanced options like black-out hours, vacation mode and personalized, downloadable wavetones.

Known issues:
Remember, this is just a preview, so there are still some kinks in the system. Here are some we know about and are working on:

• At certain times of day, your first choice notifier may be unavailable. In this case, a substitute will be provided
• Genuine greetings may be confused for notifications. We are working on clearer signals to disambiguate these situations, but when in doubt we recommend you check your Google Wave inbox.

Check out our demo video to see Google Wave wave notifications in action:

We look forward to adding more types of Google Wave wave notifications, but want to hear how it's working for you, so please give us feedback.

Happy waving!

Posted by Pat Coleman, Software engineer, Google Wave Team

Beyond Yes/No/Maybe: Gathering Feedback in waves

One fact is very clear on the web: people love polls, and people love seeing poll results. That's probably why the "Yes/No/Maybe" gadget, which is installed by default for all Google Wave users, is our most popular extension. People use it to find out things like who will be attending an event or who agrees with a certain opinion. I've even seen some users repurpose it to do polls, like "What should I paint my house, Red or Blue?", and instruct people to say "Yes" for one option and "No" for the other. But, now that we've added two new feedback extensions to the extensions gallery, you no longer have to repurpose Yes/No/Maybe -- just use the extension that's best for the job.


Pollo Gadget

Sometimes you want a full-featured survey in your wave, to get opinions from participants on a variety of options - that's what this gadget enables. Participants can vote for an existing option or add a new one if their favorite isn't listed. Additionally, any participant can modify the configuration for the poll, like whether participants can vote multiple times, whether to show people's avatars next to their vote, and more.

You can use Pollo to gather opinions from colleagues about work conditions (like the Greek food in the cafe, yum), ask conference attendees about their background, or vote on the best submissions in a contest.

If you like that gadget, you might also want to try out these extensions: Poll Gadget, Yes/No/Maybe+, and Decing.



Likey

Sometimes you just want to sprinkle your wave with little approval/disapproval widgets, to see whether other participants agree. The Likey gadget displays "Like|Dislike", the number of participants that have clicked "Like" or "Dislike", and an indicator of what you clicked.

You can use Likey to figure out which items people like on a restaurant menu (we do this with internal cafe menus), vote on movies you're thinking of watching with friends, or learn what your teammates think about specific product feature requests.

If you like that gadget, you might also want to try out these extensions: PlusOne Gadget and Like-it.

Waffle

Other times, you have a really specific objective: finding out the best date for a particular event. The Waffle gadget is perfect for that - it lets users add on potential dates, indicate "yes/no/maybe" for each date, and then summarizes the results for each date. And yes, it does look a bit like a Waffle.

You could use it to decide when to watch a movie, figure out when your team members are going on vacation, or schedule a round of beer nights.

Please try out these extensions, and let us know what you think in the user help forum. Give us feedback on how you gathered feedback!

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations, Google Wave Team

Novell Pulse and Google Wave Collaborate in Real-time

You're probably used to sending emails to friends and colleagues at any number of different addresses and you don't have to think twice about which email service they use. The same should be true for collaboration tools. Novell Pulse, an upcoming enterprise-focused collaboration tool, is built using the Google Wave Federation Protocol, which means Novell Pulse users will be able to collaborate not only with each other, but also with anyone using another wave service, such as Google Wave.

At the closing keynote of Novell's BrainShare conference today, we showed a demo of how Novell Pulse and Google Wave will work together. For those of you who weren't at the event, here is a screen capture of the two products working together [the keynote video will be available early next week]:



This boils down to enabling user choice. We're working on the Google Wave Federation Protocol based on open source principles with other companies including Novell because we want users to have a choice of different wave providers. The protocol is flexible enough that different products can include different features, but still work together, letting wave providers make independent design decisions and even build for a specific group of users. For example, Novell Pulse includes a feature for authenticating against enterprise account management systems, and Google Wave has per-wave participant suggestion built in.

We look forward to seeing more products support the Google Wave Federation Protocol. If you're interested in trying Google Wave, you can request an account, and for more details on Novell Pulse's use of the Google Wave Federation Protocol, check out the post on the developer blog.

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager, Google Wave

Finding fun and useful extensions for Google Wave

Today, we're adding an "Extensions" link to the Google Wave navigation panel that gives you quick access to a set of fun and functional featured extensions for waves.


The gallery is simply a set of waves containing extension installers (the puzzle pieces). The first wave, "Read me first" contains an introduction to extensions and how to use them.

We released Google Wave to the developer community first back in May 2009. We did this because we wanted them to help complement the product's core features by building rich extensions.

When we launched our preview in September, we featured some great extensions and prototypes, like AccuWeather's forecast gadget, LabPixie's competitive Sudoku game and even built a couple ourselves, like Yes No Maybe and a Google Maps gadget. Since then, many more extensions have been built, and we want to make it easier for everyone to discover them.

Just click the link to browse some featured extension installers. When you find one you like, click the "Install" button to add it to your Google Wave interface (often it will appear as an icon in the editing toolbar) so you can add it to any of your waves. If you decide you no longer want to have an extension installed, you can uninstall it from the "Settings" link in the navigation panel (you can install and uninstall extensions as many times as you want).

For example, say I wanted to arrange dinner for the engineers who built this feature. I could look through the set of extensions and select the Take Out extension:


After installing it, I can start a new wave, add the extension and add the team onto the wave, so we can pick the menu for the evening together:


Then we can wrap up our order, and get on with the feast.

When you explore the extensions, you'll notice a wide variety of new ones including: Waffle, which helps coordinate convenient times to get together; Mind Map, to collaboratively build and visualize workflows or hierarchies; and Napkin, for doodling together. To check out others, sign into your Google Wave account and simply click the "Extensions" link in the navigation panel.

If you watched the Google I/O demo video, you may remember some rich demonstrations of the technology -- things like Bloggy, the blog robot, and Rosy, the translation robot -- that we showed to help encourage developers to build great things, but those particular extensions aren't yet ready for prime time.

We hope you'll enjoy easier access to these extensions, and we'd love your feedback as we continue to improve the gallery experience. In particular, you may notice that the extension gallery waves don't usually remain "read" -- this is a known issue that we're addressing along with some other design improvements. As we find more extensions, we'll be adding them to this gallery as well (if you're a developer with an extension that you'd like featured, please read this post).

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager, Google Wave

Help test email notifications!

Now you can receive email notifications about new and updated waves in your inbox! To test it out, just use the dropdown menu by the Inbox link:

Go to your Inbox, drop down the menu - et voila !

How does it work?
From the Notifications menu, you can select the frequency of your email updates. If you are an infrequent Google Wave user we would recommend the "immediately" setting, but you can change it at any time.

When you're added to a new wave, or a wave that you are on changes, we'll send you an email with a short summary of the text and links to go straight to your updated waves. Rest assured, we know waves can change a lot, so we will only send you one notification about a changed wave until you have logged in to look at it (i.e.: if a wave changes 10 times after we send the first notification, we won't send 10 more emails). Waves you have open also won't trigger updates.

I love this! Please switch on email notifications for all of my friends!
We're still refining this feature and part of that includes getting feedback from enthusiastic users like you.

If you want to use Google Wave with your friends, family or colleagues who aren't logging in frequently, help them to turn on notifications. Then, they can get updates on their Google Wave account, even if they mainly stick to checking their email inbox.

Known issues
This is still a work in progress. For example, we're aware that:

• Sometimes the email snippet does not show all participants on the wave
• Under certain conditions you may get an update about a wave even if you were the last person to change it
• To change the notifications setting you have to go back to the menu where you turned it on. (The link at the bottom of the notification emails is not working yet.)

We will resolve these issues over the next few weeks, but wanted to get your early feedback. If you try this feature and would like to report issues to us, please use our help forum.

Posted by Ged Ellis, Software engineer, Google Wave Team