Embed sites in waves with the Iframe Gadget

Right now, there are a handful of Google Wave gadgets designed to help you bring information from other sites into a wave and interact with that content collaboratively. It will be a wonderful day when every website can be wave-ified inside a Google Wave gadget, but until then, I want to share a simple method for embedding arbitrary webpages inside a wave- a new third party extension called the Iframe Gadget. When you insert this gadget, you (and anyone else in the wave) can specify the URL of a webpage, and the gadget will render that site right inside the wave. It works best with webpages that provide an embed code, like Google Maps, and fill all the available screen space.

For example, let's say you want to embed your team's calendar on a wave. First, follow the instructions in the Google Calendar Help Center to find the Iframe code for embedding the calendar. Then, copy the URL out of that code and specify it in the Iframe gadget. Presto, calendar-o!

Basically, any time a site gives you a snippet of code that includes "< iframe >", you can retrieve the URL and use it with the Iframe gadget. Here's another example of how to embed a Google presentation in a wave. First, click "Share->Publish" on the presentation, then copy the URL from the Iframe code there and paste that into the Iframe gadget, making sure it's tall enough to show the controls.


Even if the site doesn't give you an Iframe embed code, you can still try embedding the page URL and see how it looks.

To get started with the IFrame gadget, sign into Google Wave and install it from here.

Additionally, if a site gives you a snippet of code that uses an "<embed>" or "<script>" tag (equating to a Flash or JavaScript widget), you can use the HTML gadget, by the same author, to embed that site in a wave. To try that one out, install it from here.

We hope this helps you integrate more content into Google Wave.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations, Google Wave Team

Removing participants

One of the more glaringly obvious missing features over Google Wave's short public life has been the ability to remove participants from waves. It has several obvious benefits:

• Removing someone who you accidentally added
• Removing yourself from a wave that's no longer interesting
• Removing someone who's not participating in good spirit or at all
• Removing another person as a courtesy when the wave is no longer relevant to them

We knew this would not just be as simple as eliminating a user abruptly from a conversation. For instance, if you removed your friend as a courtesy, she should still be able to access to the content she has already seen.

Furthermore, the interaction between private replies and the larger wave conversation is interesting. Should you keep participating in a private reply even though you've been removed from the main conversation? How about if you've never seen the main conversation?

Answering these questions is a lot tougher than it may seem at first glance -- particularly considering Google Wave's unique liveness, where every action has an immediate consequence that's visible to all participants on a wave. Designing a scalable infrastructure for this proved challenging, at times confounding, and ultimately very rewarding.

Our coolest innovation in my opinion is what we think of as the It-Never-Happened scenario. Imagine this: after a rough day at work, you spend the night out with friends and return home to write a less-than-flattering message to, say, your boss. At 6am you wake up and realize what you've done to your implacable horror! Alas, with email and other forms of communication, you'd be out of luck, and perhaps spend all morning inventing clever excuses about how your computer was taken over by crafty hackers. With a wave however, you simply remove your boss as a participant, and when she wakes up at 7am to check her messages, the wave is gone from her inbox. As long as she didn't open the wave before you removed her, she will never see it. Cool!


But what if she had already opened the wave by the time you removed her from it? Well, consider a different scenario: someone adds you to a wave promising they'll fetch the water if you'll whitewash their fence. You open the wave, agree to the proposition, and proceed with the whitewashing. Yards of fence later, that someone removes you from the wave. You certainly would want to have a record of the deal ('It totally happened')! Since you had opened the wave before you were removed from it, you retain a read-only copy of the wave up to the time you were removed. You can still play back the wave, but you won't see future changes or be able to make further contributions.



We carefully designed the feature so neither the person who removed you, nor others on the wave can see whether or not you have opened the wave. They can only tell you have been removed and that you no longer see changes to the wave (unless, of course, someone adds you back).

Finally, you also have the option to remove yourself from a wave. We've all been added to conversation threads that turned out to be unimportant or uninteresting. With email you have to ask someone else to take you off the thread, or set up a filter to stop those messages from appearing in your inbox. Now in Wave, when your friend adds you to a wave about the dinner party he's having the same weekend that you're out of town for business, you can simply remove yourself from the wave and you won't have a constant reminder of all the fun you'll be missing.

We hope the considerable amount of effort we've put into designing and building this feature increases your productivity and ability to organize and share waves the way you want.

Wave on!

Posted by Dhanji R. Prasanna, Software Engineer, Google Wave team

Wave for Webjournos | The right tool, the right time

This is a guest post from Cory Haik, Assistant Managing Editor, Seattletimes.com.

On April 12, 2010, it was announced The Seattle Times was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for coverage of the tragic slayings of four Lakewood, Wash., police officers on November 29, 2009. That honor recognized the work of the entire newsroom and the award goes to the whole staff. I'd like to extend that just a bit.

As a Web journalist, it's all about choosing the right tools wisely. Sometimes those tools are the tried and true. Like a notebook and pen. Shoe-leather, feet-on-the-street reporting should never be taken for granted or displaced by shiny new products. But sometimes, well, it's all about the beta, baby. Like going live from an iPhone with the Ustream broadcaster app. Or like a Twitter hashtag stream on your homepage. Or like Google Wave.

Below is an excerpt from the quick piece I wrote for seattletimes.com the day after the manhunt for the shooting suspect was over. It describes some of the social-tool uses which were a critical part of the online breaking news coverage of this traumatic community event. Using Google Wave was something we thought of in the moment -- and in the middle of a breaking story that already included several social media elements.

Seattletimes.com decided at the height of the story to engage with local citizenry and others through a social media experiment. Google Wave, described by Google as, "an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration," became a live document that allowed folks on the web interested in the story to take part in helping move it forward. It was social media, reporting and online journalism at the next level. At least, a crack at it.

Some elements of the wave included links to police scanner audio, live video, information about road closures, school lockdowns, suspect information and more. A manhunt map was created inside the wave and updated by participants. And a map was linked inside the wave that seattletimes.com then used on the site. It was useful to producers updating the site because they could put information out and get tips back, instantly. We then could pass the tips on to the Metro desk and follow along that way. It was like using Twitter with a real-time response and rich content.

Despite the fact that we reached fewer than 500 people and encountered a couple of technical glitches, I'd like to think that using Google Wave was successful. And if the No. 1 rule of social media -- or at least my No. 1 rule of social media -- is that using it as it's useful to you is the rule, then I am quite confident it was.

Thanks to the folks at Google Wave for giving me this place to post. And here's where I'd like to extend the breaking news award to all the users that read and engaged with our site, to all the @seattletimes followers and especially to the folks that jumped into our Google Wave experiment (PDF of the wave). It was picking up one of the right tools for this breaking news coverage. And that's the key to serving the story and serving the user-- the two most important things.

Posted by Cory Tobert Haik, Assistant Managing Editor, seattletimes.com

Google Wave for Artists

Considering the amount of time I spend on art groups and discussion forums, I was thrilled to hear about Google Groups support in Google Wave. After moving a couple of online and offline groups onto Google Wave, the other group admins and I realized how effective waves are for managing group content.

We use the groups to share our artwork, everything from five-minute sketches, to work-in-progress pieces, to finished paintings. Once or twice a month, we send out group assignments where everyone picks one reference picture or theme to work on. Once they've finished working on it, members drop their work in the wave for that theme. This is a lot of fun since we get to see a variety of interpretations from different corners of the world.



Before, our conversations were distributed between 4 or 5 websites and online tools and it was really difficult for new members to catch up with the rest of the group. Google Wave now serves as a one-stop-shop for our group, and the conversations are livelier since we aren't restricted to text-only interaction.

We no longer need to keep track of member locations in spreadsheets and group databases. The Clustered Map gives us a visual representation of where everyone is located and is a handy tool for organizing offline activities like sketchcrawls.

The Plus One extension has eliminated the need to scroll through pages and pages of "+1s" and "I agree" to figure out what the group wants. The Waffle extension makes it easier for the group to pick a topic for an online class or a weekly challenge.

Discussions don't need to begin and end in the Google Wave interface. We can embed waves in our websites or blogs and access the conversation both on our website and from the Google Wave UI.


Given all the benefits, there is a learning curve for new members and they do need a little hand-holding to get used to the features (from "How do I send my photos? There's no attachment option." to "Oh, I can just drag-n-drop! How cool!"). So, here are some tips for admins and members to get started on group waves:

Tips for group admins:

• Use tags to organize your waves and create redirects or short URLs for members to access these waves easily
• Have an FAQ wave with tips on how to post and participate in the group waves
• If you have certain waves you don't want the group members to edit, set the group alias to read-only access on these waves
• If your group creates specific kind of waves frequently, create templates

Tips for group members:

• Minimize panels if you find the incoming waves in the inbox distracting
• Group waves do not show in your inbox yet, so save a search to locate group waves easily
• When you find a wave interesting, follow it so that it will automatically go to your inbox
• Check this wave for some ideas on how you can participate in art groups

I'm always looking out for new art groups to join, so if you know of any art groups on Google Wave, or would like to get your group using it, join the discussion at http://goo.gl/ZO0v .


Posted by Pooja Srinivas, Associate Manager, Google Analytics, Hyderabad, India