Here are five examples of common workplace activities that Google Wave can support.

1. Conferences and Professional Development

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This one probably seems obvious. Departments can set up Google Waves to discuss what’s happening at a particular event. A company with limited funds could send one person to a conference and use Google Wave as a reporting mechanism. Or if several people attend, they can divide/conquer the event and post their ideas and comments in one place.

For example Chris Hoyt, author of the blog The Recruiter Guy, set up a Wave for the human resources and recruiting community during last year’s Social Recruiting Summit. Both attendees and those of us who were interested but couldn’t make it in person were able to join the Wave. It was an opportunity to gain exposure to the content and learn more about the event so people could budget to attend the following year.

One thing I could see emerging from conference Waves are “back channel” discussions. Conference organizers in particular will want to pay particular attention to this and not necessarily view it as a bad thing. If managed properly, it could bring some opportunities for improvement to light during the event.

2. Decision Making and Problem Solving

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Using Google Wave to discuss a company challenge could be very beneficial — especially when all of the players aren’t located in the same place. That’s exactly why Troy Peterson, CEO of Nibi Software, used Wave to get the company’s development plan finalized.  He brought everyone together in a Wave and let the conversation flow. “The real-time document functionality allowed us to have ‘arguments’ and solve problems together that might otherwise have resulted in ‘back and forth’ threads that went on forever.”

Peterson did mention that adoption was an initial challenge. “Although several of my contacts immediately had Wave accounts, they weren’t necessarily the people I was collaborating with on projects.  It required some arm wrestling to get people on board.” But the results were worth it. “In the end, we have a succinct document that we have all agreed on and that we can compare short-term objectives against.”

3. Project Management

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The same decision making philosophy applies when you have a project and need to collaborate not only with internal stakeholders, but an external supplier. Google Wave provides an opportunity for collaboration. Hopefully, consultants and/or contractors are able to tap into that dialogue by sharing their Wave account info with client companies.

Rachel Levy, Founder/CEO of the startup website WebinarListings, is using Google Wave with her developer. “We have the list of open items in the Wave, so we can discuss each one. I add an open item, and he can ask me a question about it, or mark it as done.” The main advantage to using this application was being able to track conversations.

This could also be a valuable way to manage the dreaded “scope creep.” You can lay out the entire project in a single Wave once the parameters are agreed upon. Then, you can work through each facet with each side tracking progress and those pesky project deviations. And everything gets documented along the way. New project requirements can even be moved to a new Wave for later consideration.

4. Brainstorming and Idea Cultivation

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Brendan Gill, with the firm Staircase3, said he and his partners use Google Wave as a medium to organize and facilitate conversations and feedback. “We are a team of entrepreneurs who like to have an idea and make it happen quickly. We use Google Wave to brainstorm our ideas for new business projects.  It’s a great tool for collecting a series of conversations, and we use a different Wave for each different idea.”

Gill explained they would have traditionally used group e-mails for this purpose, but found Wave has numerous advantages, including serving as a centralized repository, and the ability to use add-on features for enhanced productivity. This was especially useful since their management team is located around the globe. “The Ribbit conferencing feature is great for staging an ad hoc conference call. Furthermore, the simple voting widget is a useful way to end each of our Waves where we can stage a vote for a given idea — whether or not we want to put the idea in motion, or just cut it loose.”

5. Virtual Meetings and Reduced Travel

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Let’s face it. Bringing groups of people together can be expensive. Depending on the project, Google Wave could help foster dialogue without a lot of travel, phone calls, etc. Gill mentioned using Wave to make edits and adjustments on business proposals without having people travel to a central location. “Using Wave definitely reduces the need for thousand-dollar transatlantic flights and many tons of carbon emissions. Obviously without Wave, we would still use e-mails and teleconferencing, but using a better communications platform has definitely cut a number of flights out of our schedule,” he said.

Gill added that, “Collaboration can be done in real-time, if required, which is useful if you’re trying to rush out a project that has to happen quickly or not at all. Or for longer-term projects, you can take your time to think about an idea and come back to the plan at any time you like.”

Conclusion

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If you’re looking for a way to streamline communications on your next project, Peterson suggests that you “Sign up and use the tool. It may not revolutionize your company’s communications, but it is useful and worth the effort involved in figuring out how it works for your organization.”

Remember the success of a Wave is contingent upon the active participation of the individuals involved. Waves need engagement, attention and clarity. You can’t just ask a question and walk away for a couple days. According to Levy, “The bigger the Wave gets, the slower it gets.” Managing activity and open items becomes essential for productivity.

How are you using Google Wave to improve your work life? Share your stories in the comments.

A week ago we asked readers to tell us how they’re using Google Wave in their daily lives, and despite a bit of “ha! no one’s using Wave!” snarking on the Twitter, we got lots of interesting responses.

Unsurprisingly, most Wavers use it as a real-time wiki, but some take advantage of features unique to Wave, like inline and private replies, public tags, and gadgets. I featured the most unique use cases I got in a brand new chapter just added to The Complete Guide to Google Wave. The following is the text of the just-published Chapter 10, which describes ways in which a few people who don’t work for Google are using Wave to get things done—with screenshots.

So far you’ve learned the finer workings of Wave in great detail, but there’s a big difference between understanding how to swing a hammer and building a house. In this chapter, you’ll meet regular people who are already getting things done with Wave in their daily work and life. You’ll learn the Wave techniques they’ve developed through trial and error, and the specific Wave features they use to get certain jobs done. Finally, you’ll create wave templates you can use and reuse for your own purposes.

Take a look at some real-world case studies of Wave in action.

Wave as a Group To-do List and Daily Work Log

Justin Swall runs Swall’s Associated Services, a small company which provides computer repair and consulting for small businesses. Justin uses Wave as a daily to-do list that he and his co-workers update to track who has done what. He makes use of the “Copy to New Wave” feature to transfer undone items from one day to the next, as shown in Figure 10-1.

Here’s Justin’s Wave workflow: every day he uses a fresh wave that contains that day’s tasks, ordered by priority, and what time they’re due. Over the course of the day, Justin’s group updates the wave to reflect the current status of each task.

Justin says:

During the day either the initial wave is edited (usually by me) to add additional items to the list, and everyone else uses inline replies to update when items are completed, or if additional information needs to be conveyed back and forth. At the end of each day I copy the day’s wave to a new wave, change the date to the next day, remove the items that were completed the day before, add new items or notes to the list, or move items from secondary to primary. Wash, rinse, repeat.

By creating a new wave that carries over the outstanding tasks left on yesterday’s wave, Justin leaves behind a daily work log that he can reference later.

Justin prefers Wave to discuss tasks because it’s a single, hosted conversation.

For various reasons, Outlook tasks never seemed to work for us. Emailing is a nightmare (I either keep thinking of more things to add to the list and end up sending out five or more messages by morning, or I’m so afraid of doing that I keep it open as a draft so I can keep adding to it then forget to send it at all).

If you’re interested in using Wave to manage projects beyond daily tasks, see the later section in this chapter, “Wave for Project Management.”

Wave as an Event Planner

Wave is a fine productivity tool, but it also can help you have fun, too. Fifteen-year old Sean Cascketta uses Wave to organize weekend get-togethers with his classmates.

Sean explains:

If I’m formatting a Wave for organizing an event, it usually comes with a basic list of the details (like who, what, where, etc…) as well as a Yes/No/Maybe gadget, which is perfect for these events as we can both constantly check on the RSVP status of people, and they can use the status feature to give any extra details (like if they’re bringing along some party favors, electronics or such).

Sean used Wave to create an invitation to a viewing of The Goonies, as shown in Figure 10-2.

Brunch-lover Jed McClure uses Wave to organize his weekly “Brooklyn Brunch Club,” a group of friends who brunch somewhere different in Brooklyn each week, and RSVP whether or not they can make it.

Jed describes the process:

We have a pretty dedicated group of brunchers here in Brooklyn, and many brunch options. But the onerous task of coordinating usually ended up resulting in people getting left off the email list. With Google Wave, the idea was to maintain a permanent Brunch wave, where people in the group could check in with and see where the next brunching would happen, and then reply if they were going to try to make it. We also set up a map widget and filled in all the spots we like to hit, to help when making suggestions (and to avoid the dreaded brunch rut).

The Brooklyn Brunch Club wave consists of maps, inline discussions debating which brunch place to hit up next, and a Yes/No/Maybe gadget to collect RSVPs, as shown in Figure 10-3.

Jed says:

So far it has worked pretty well. The threaded nature of the dialog means that it needs to be ‘pruned’ after each brunch, so that the relevant info remains at the top of the wave. And also train people to look in the history for past brunch details.

With maps and Yes/No/Maybe built in, party, vacation, brunch, or any event planning is one of Wave’s most obvious use cases.

Wave as Holiday Gift List Tracker

Hal Wilke has two young children, and when the holidays approach, he gives gift suggestions for his kids to their grandparents. This past year he and his wife used Wave to share and update the list.

Hal explains:

We always email Christmas lists to Grandparents, and then get emails back sometimes to me, sometimes to my wife. Or phone calls at odd times telling us what they bought, so we have to track notes that we write about the phone calls. It was much easier this year [in Wave] because the grandparents could edit the wave as they purchased gifts, and we did not have people buying duplicate gifts, and didn’t have to track multiple lists of purchased gifts. Pretty cool that the grandparents were cool with using Wave.

The kids’ gift wave included Hal’s wife, but Hal used Wave’s private reply feature to discuss a surprise gift for her with the kids’ grandparents, as shown in Figure 10-4.

Wave for Collaborative Meeting Notes

One of the most common suggested uses of Wave is taking collaborative notes^[1] during meetings, classes or conference sessions, and Indiana University employee Manjit Trehan does just that. Manjit’s meetings usually have about 10 people attending, and four or five are in Wave, taking notes.

Instead of everyone co-editing a single blip, Manjit separates agenda items into their own individual blips.

Manjit says the process evolved from trial and error:

What I learned after a few meetings [of taking notes in Wave] is that it is best to enter one agenda item per blip. This allows a separate thread to progress below each item. Say we are meeting about ordering some hardware, and there are three open items to be discussed. Vendor selection, Installation schedule, and deployment schedule. Each of these would end up in a separate blip.

Manjit says meeting note waves can get lengthy, but he created a sample meeting wave with separate agenda blips, shown in Figure 10-5.

Wave for Project Management

You’ve already seen one way to use Wave as a daily task tracker; you can also manage a more complex group project in Wave. This very book, produced by a team of six people-including the authors, our copyeditor, designer, tech lead, and project manager-used Wave to track and manage its production process.^[2]

Create a project workspace in Wave using an agreed-upon tag and a saved search for waves with that tag. For example, when we started managing the book project in Wave, our group decided that every book-related wave would get the “cwg” tag (short for CompleteWaveGuide.com). Each of us also saved a tag:cwg search and referred to it to see only project-specific waves, as shown in Figure 10-6.

When you’re managing a project in Wave, create a new wave to discuss each topic, task, or facet of the project. For example, for this book project, we used one wave per chapter to discuss chapter-specific questions and edits. For each new edition, we’d clean out the chapter wave of old blips, and start anew, knowing that old conversation was still archived in the wave’s playback should we need to see it. We kept other separate waves to draft the style guide, discuss pricing, and see cover image revisions.

Wave as a Conference Backchannel

A smart use of wave tags works well in public waves as well as private ones. Tagged public waves make it easy for anyone to find a relevant place to discuss news or a current event, as it happens, in real-time. In fact, many tech-savvy conference organizers publicize a unique tag for its attendees to use when they post status updates to Twitter or photos to Flickr about the event. Attendees can use that same tag in Wave to create and add to event-specific discussions, too. (Those who aren’t at the event can eavesdrop on those public waves, ask questions, and add to the discussion from afar.)

For example, at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in November of 2009, I (Gina) gave a keynote presentation called “Making Sense of Google Wave,”^[3] and invited attendees to wave about it using the public, agreed-upon conference tag w2e. Before I took the stage, I started a public wave and tagged it w2e so that anyone who searched for with:public tag:w2e could discuss my keynote or any other session they attended, as shown in Figure 10-7.

This technique has been used at events beyond Web 2.0 Expo; bloggers at both eComm Europe^[4] and the MediaWiki conference^[5] noted that attendees used Wave to take minutes, discuss sessions in real-time, and collaborate on notes.

(Watch a video of the 15-minute “Making Sense of Google Wave” keynote at http://goo.gl/7cK3.)

Wave for Breaking News

The live, real-time nature of Wave makes it a natural fit for collaborating on breaking news as it happens. In fact, when Seattle police were on the hunt for a man suspected of shooting four cops, the Seattle Times used a public wave to rapidly publish updates about the manhunt^[6] and solicit information from reader in the process, as shown in Figure 10-8.

Granted, most people aren’t conducting a manhunt for a suspected killer, but we all have a reason to broadcast and get live updates on events as they happen to us-like when your sister-in-law goes into labor, or Aunt Martha’s undergoing surgery, or Mom in New York is worried about how close the forest fires are to your home in San Diego and whether you’ve been evacuated.

Wave for Q&A

Wave’s inline reply feature makes it a solid choice for having conversations that require back-and-forth on individual points: like an interview. Question and answer interactions can happen very easily in Wave, because the interviewer can start a wave with multiple questions. Then, the respondent can reply to each question inline, and the interviewer can optionally follow up to the response right below it without disrupting the flow of the series. The result is a readable Q&A in the correct order, as shown in Figure 10-9.

Create Wave Templates for Reuse

If you create waves with the same formatting and gadgets often, create a “template” wave for reuse to save yourself repetitive work. For example, if you plan a recurring event in Wave, create a new wave, and format your event title, description, and details area to your liking, and add the Yes/No/Maybe and maps gadget. Save that wave in a “Templates” folder you create.

Then, the next time you need a wave to plan the event, open the template, and select “Copy to new wave” from the timestamp drop-down. Fill in the details for the event in the new copy.

Public Wave Templates

Googler Pamela Fox did just that and made her templates public and read-only, available for anyone to copy for their own purposes. Visit the read-only, public wave which lists her templates at http://goo.gl/GNUw, like the event planner wave template shown in Figure 10-10.

References

1. ↑ When to use Google Wave, Google.com
2. ↑ How to Manage a Group Project in Google Wave, Lifehacker.com
3. ↑ “Making Sense of Google Wave”: Web 2.0 Expo New York 2009, Web2Expo.com
4. ↑ How to Use Google Wave for Collaborative Conference Notes and Conversation, Emerging Tech Talk
5. ↑ MediaWiki conference uses Wave to work on minutes, Mediawiki Wave
6. ↑ Another Google Wave Use: Manhunt, TechCrunch.com

Post is from Lifehacker, by Gina Trapani

Wave combines features from email, instant messenger, Google Docs, wikis, and forums and throws its own spin on things. For a quick visual of its offerings versus similar tools, check out this feature-by-feature comparison table.

You’ll notice that Wave doesn’t have a green yes in every cell in its column; it’s still missing functionality that’s holding it back from being a viable alternative in a production environment—specifically, user permissions (everyone can edit everything) and the ability to export a wave or publish it so that anyone can see its contents (not just folks logged into Wave).

This table is slated to go into chapter 1 of the first edition of The Complete Guide to Google Wave, so give me a shout if you’ve got ideas for how to polish it up before we rev up the printers.

Aj v tomto prípade platí, kto skôr príde, ten skôr mele.

The mere promise of Google Wave inspired a rainbow of potential use cases, but Wave’s best real-world use boils down to this: it helps a group get things done together. Here’s how to manage a group project in Wave.

Note: If you haven’t gotten your Wave invite yet, check out our invitation donation thread first (or, better yet, keep an eye out for the same thread this Friday). If you have gotten into Wave, search for title:"Invite others to Google Wave" to find the wave with your invites. Wave’s only fun if your cohorts and workmates also have it, so give out your nominations to the people you want to wave with.

Wave’s invitations have been rolling out steadily over the last few weeks, so you and your co-workers might have already gotten some Wave love. If so, let’s take a look at how you can manage a project in the real world, even given Wave’s current unfinished state.

Background: Over the last two months, I’ve co-managed a large-scale group project with a team of six people in Wave: the production of Adam’s and my new book, The Complete Guide to Google Wave. We didn’t write the book in Wave, mind you—but we did manage the project in Wave, where we collaborated on everything behind the scenes, from the book’s style guide, to its pricing plan, and to iterations of its cover design. Whether you’re writing a book or planning a weekend trip, here are a few techniques you and your workgroup mates should know that make Wave a great project management tool.

Shared Tags and Saved Searches

To keep all the project-specific waves into a single bucket, the first thing all the members of your group should do is agree on a project-specific tag. Unlike email folders or Gmail’s labels, Wave’s tags are visible to all wave participants, like Flickr or Delicious tags. So if you decide your project’s tag is “Vacation plans,” everyone tags project waves the same and can find waves based on that tag.

To easily see if there are new updates on the project’s waves, save a search for the tag. In this case, search for tag:”Vacation plans” and click the “Save Search” button on the bottom of the search panel. (You can even assign a color to the saved search for some visual flair.) Once that’s done, you have a project-specific “inbox” (so to speak) in the Searches area of the Navigation panel.

In the screenshot at the top of this article, you can see that for the book project, the agreed-upon tag was “cwg,” and in my Wave client, it was colored gray.

You can even break down project tags even further by combining them. For example, you could tag waves specific to hotel research “Vacation plans” and “hotels.” Then, a search for tag:"Vacation plans" tag:hotels will narrow down the results further. Here’s more on saved searches and Wave filters.

Choose to Reply Below a Blip, Inline, or Edit the Blip

Unlike email, where you can either reply to an entire message or chop it up into quotes and reply inline (which is a tedious and manual process), in Wave you can do either of those things—OR just edit the message that someone else wrote, as if it were a Google Document. This ability to co-author a single message and see past revisions of that message in one place is what sets Wave apart.

In a public wave situation where anyone can edit anything that anyone else has written, it can be total chaos (see, for example, the Lifehacker public wave we tried out with readers). But within a trusted circle of co-editors, revising a single blip together—and having the option to have threaded inline conversations about that content as well—makes getting work done much easier.

For example, if someone asks a series of questions, others can reply inline like email (but more conveniently). But if someone’s drafting a document and needs help filling in the holes and keeping it updated, others can just dive in and hit the Edit button, like Wikipedia. In the screenshot here, you can see a message that has had two authors (Jon and me) but also contains inline replies.

Wave’s three modes of interacting with and editing content—replies, inline replies, and co-editing blips—makes its collaborative abilities in a single context very powerful. Here’s more on the three ways to update a wave.

Private Replies

Sometimes in a group conversation, you want to direct a private reply to a single member or subset of a group about a larger issue—and Wave makes that very easy. Inside the context of a single wave, you can click on the timestamp drop-down and choose “Private Reply” to say something to a subset of that wave’s participants that no one else can see. This ability comes in extremely handy whenever someone has something to add that’s only meant for a few people’s eyes. These private conversations with you appear inline on the wave that everyone else can see—so it can feel weird, like you’re talking behind the backs of others but right in front of them—however, not everyone can see the private back-and-forth in wave. Here’s more on how to send a reply only certain people can see in Wave.

Playback and Wave Forking

Since Wave is more a document collaboration tool than an email replacement, its contents are living things that go through a series of change and revisions over time. Wave’s playback feature lets you move forward and back through those revisions. If a wave has changed too much, and you want to restore an older version of it, Wave makes that possible. While you’re in playback mode, in an older revision, from the timestamp drop-down, choose “Copy Wave” to create a new wave that contains that old revision. (Currently you can’t restore a wave itself to an older version of itself; you have to copy that version to a new wave.)

Here’s more on how to play back wave changes over time to catch up on a conversation or restore a past version.

Helpful Bots, Gadgets, and Add-ons

There are tons of Wave bots and gadgets out there, and the ones that will help with your project depend on what you’re doing. But there are a few that could help in almost any situation.

The XMPP Lite Bot: One of the issues with adopting Google Wave into your workflow is the whole “yet another inbox” problem. If you’re working on a project in Wave but forget to check it every day, you can get notifications of wave updates via IM. The XMPP Lite bot can GChat you as project waves get updated. To use it, add the bot to your contacts (its Wave ID is wave-xmpp@appspot.com), and then add that same contact to your GTalk contacts list. Add the bot to any wave you want IM notifications from, and click the Subscribe button.

The Yes/No/Maybe Gadget: One of the simplest and most useful Wave gadgets available, the Yes/No/Maybe gadget makes asking a simple question of a group and tallying responses dead-simple. To use it, type a question into your wave that has the possible answers, Yes, No, or Maybe. Then, click on the Yes/No/Maybe button on your Wave toolbar. (It’s got three small boxes—green, red, and yellow.) Then, wave participants can just click on their response and add a little note by clicking the “Set my status” link.

Here are a few more great gadgets and bots for Wave.

Google Gears and a modern browser (or a plug-in for IE): The advantage of using a web application is that you don’t have to install software other than a web browser onto your system to access it. That advantage comes with some caveats in Wave. Google Gears, the browser add-on that ships with Chrome but that you have to download and install for Firefox and Safari, isn’t required for Wave, but adds essential functionality: the ability to drag and drop files into Wave. The bad news for Mac users is that Gears is still(!) not available for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (why, Google, why?) and it doesn’t come with the Mac build of Chrome, either. However, if you’re on a PC and you want to easily share files in Wave, you need Gears. (In fact, Wave is speedier and more stable in Google Chrome than Firefox and Safari, so if you’re on a PC it’s worth using Chrome for Wave.)

Additionally, Wave doesn’t play nice with vanilla Internet Explorer. Since it relies on new and emerging web technologies that IE doesn’t support yet, if you try to access Wave in IE, you’ll get prompted to use another browser or use the Chrome Frame IE add-on. This might throw a wrench into your plans to collaborate with co-workers in IT lockdown, without the ability to install an alternate browser or IE add-on on their office computer.

While Wave doesn’t have classic project management tools like to-do lists or Gantt charts built-in, it’s great for project-specific real-time messaging and collaborating. (Plus, to-do lists and more are no doubt on the way in the form of Wave extensions.)

Have you done anything in Wave besides chat it up with a few strangers? Got any Wave advice, tips, or insights? Let us know in the comments.

From Lifehacker.com

Dnes ráno som si v pošte našiel linku na aktiváciu Google Wave Account-u. Touto cestou sa chcem poďakovať Ferovi Volárovi (alian.info). Fero dostal 30 pozvánok do Google Wave, tak som mu včera jednoducho napisal cez contact form a dnes mám aktivovaný účet. Zábava s vlnkami začína.

O Google Wave sa môžeš dozvedieť viac z mojich článkov, alebo si prečítaj a pozri pár videocastov na stránke completewaveguide.com.

Google’s new Wave overview video nicely illustrates some of the features I’ve highlighted above.

If you’re not one of the 100,000 lucky users who gets an invitation to Google Wavetoday, don’t fret. You can check out Google Wave right here.

But first, ground rules. Click on all images in this post to see them full size. Uppercase “Wave” refers to the entire Google Wave product. Lowercase “wave” refers to an individual message or document. Think of a lowercase wave like an email or a Google Doc that you’re collaborating on with other people. The screenshots in this post are from the Wave developer preview, not wave.google.com, invites to which are going out today. We’ll update this post with anything significantly new in the non-preview version when we get our grubby little paws on the proper server invitation.

Ready? Let’s go.

Inside Google Wave

When you log into Wave, the default view is a three-column, 4-module layout. From left to right, the first column includes Navigation on top (think of this as your Inbox, Sent, and labels in Gmail) and Contacts below (think of this as your GTalk buddy list). The second column is the list of active waves in your Inbox, and the third column is where you can start a new wave or open a wave.

Here’s what it looks like. (Click to enlarge.)

When someone updates a wave in your inbox, it turns bold and moves to the top of your inbox—just like email. If a contact of yours is online, a little green dot appears on his or her icon.

All the modules are collapsible and dock themselves in the upper part of the screen. If you’ve collapsed your inbox and a new wave gets updated, it flashes green. Here I’ve clicked on new wave and minimized all the other modules to expand my workspace. (Click to enlarge.)

You can add all sorts of rich content to your wave, like a YouTube video, Google Map, image, links, or anything that a gadget enables. (More on gadgets below.) Here I’ve added some colored text and embedded a video clip in my wave. (Click to enlarge.)

When I finish typing and click the Done button on my wave, Wave pops up the “Add participants” module so I can share my wave with anyone on my contacts list. You can search for a contact by name, or just drag and drop anyone to the wave you choose. (Click to enlarge.)

Once you’ve shared a wave, the magic starts to happen. At first you’ll swoon over the ability to watch your co-waver type in real-time. It’s weird in a good, we’re-living-in-the-future way to see another person’s cursor hard at work outputting characters, key by key on your own screen. But you get over that novelty pretty quickly. (Most likely your IM client can do that; anyone who’s used collaborative editors like SubEthaEdit has seen this as well.)

You can reply to an entire wave like an IM or an email by clicking the reply button on a wave’s toolbar. But what’s most cool is the ability to reply to bits of a message inline. This lets you and your collaborators annotate the wave as you go.

For example, I gave a talk about Wave here in San Diego, and prepared my talk notes in a wave. At the beginning, I did an audience survey to gauge the level of experience with Wave-like technology. I was able to insert replies to the questions in Wave as I went. (Even better would have been to have a co-presenter or note-taker do that for me.)

You can collapse or expand inline comments easily. Here’s what the talk wave looks like with comments collapsed. Notice the small talk bubbles on the top Audience survey section. (Click to enlarge.)

Here’s what that same wave looks like with inline comments expanded. (Click to enlarge.)

Your replies inside or to a wave can also be marked as private; so if Jack and Jill and I are collaborating on a wave and Jill wants to tell me something about Jack in-wave that Jack shouldn’t see, she can click on the drop-down on the upper right of a wave and choose “Private Reply” as shown. (Click to enlarge.)

Once you’ve entered your private reply, Wave prompts you to add participants to just that reply. That’s because every reply is a wave in and of itself. You can create a new wave from any reply or copy a wave to a new wave, too.

Besides real-time updates, another “holy crap” feature of Google Wave is wave revision playback. If someone adds you to a wave late in the game, after lots of conversation and annotation has already happened, you can click on the playback button to see how it was constructed over time. Think of this like a slideshow through Wikipedia page revisions. Here’s a quick video clip of what playback looks like on a wave I was in on this morning.

Just like Gmail, Google Wave offers powerful advanced search operators, wave tagging, file uploads (though those are wonky for me in the dev preview), and saved searches. In addition to tags, Wave also offers folders. Folders! The interface is completely drag-and-drop: you can grab any wave and drag it to the trash or a folder.

Wave Extensions: Gadgets and Robots

Wave is a completely extensible platform, like Firefox. Wave extensions come in two flavors: gadgets and robots.

A gadget is a piece of rich content that you can add to a wave. A few example gadgets are available in the Gadget gallery.

Click on the puzzle piece on a wave’s toolbar to add a gadget to the wave. One useful gadget is the “Who is Coming?” gadget that lets you invite folks to an event and get RSVPs quickly and easily.

The most useful gadget I’ve seen so far is the Ribbit conference call gadget. Add it to a wave, and everyone adds their phone number to it. (You only see your own number, not everyone else’s.) Click the “Start Conference” button, and everyone’s phone rings—and you’re on the phone, while you collaborate on a wave. (Click to enlarge.)

For more on the Ribbit Wave gadget, check out Rafe Needleman’s review.

Robots are email addresses that you add to your contact list. Then, when you are in need of their services, you add a bot to a wave so they can perform some action on its contents. A robot can modify the contents of a wave, and several already exist that do silly to useful actions.

For example, Eliza the Robot Shrink (elizarobot@appspot.com) will chat with you about anything—useful when you’re the only one of your friends who has a Wave invite and you’ve no one to talk to.

More usefully, the Bloggy bot (blog-wave@appspot.com) will publish a wave onto a Blogger blog for you. For example, I have Bloggy in my contacts, and added it to my Wave talk wave as shown here. Notice the “Bloggy published this wave here” message in yellow at the top of the wave. (Click to enlarge.)

Click on the “here” link and you go to my test Wave blog, which gets the contents of that wave on it. (Click to enlarge.)

If another Wave user happens upon that blog post, s/he can comment on it in-blog, and those new updates will show up in my Wave client. Right now, you have to be logged into Wave to see blogged content; but that won’t always be the case. Google is working on making published Wave content read-only for all users, even those not logged into Wave.

Polly the Pollster (polly-wave@appspot.com) is another extremely useful bot which lets you create and distribute polls to survey wave collaborators quickly.

Other bots do things like automatically link Twitter usernames to their Twitter page, clean up empty replies (which proliferate quickly for some reason), and insert stock quotes. I expect we’ll see tons more gadgets and bots bloom over the next year. Here are some more featured Wave extensions, courtesy of Google.

But What Will We Use Google Wave For?

The most frequent question I get about Google Wave is: “But what would I use it for?” Personally I can’t wait to use it to take meeting minutes collaboratively and to co-write documents like blog posts and articles online with my editors and co-conspirators. Instead of using something like Campfire or IRC to chat with my fellow Lifehacker editors, I could see using Wave as group chat—but with inline and private replies, which are key.

Right now, like all collaboration tools, Wave is only as good as how many of the people you work (and play) with have it. Even though I was one of the developers touched by an angel, with access to the preview, I didn’t actually use Wave very much because almost zero of my actual friends and co-workers were on it. So as far as I can see, uses for Wave in your life will open up as the product itself opens up to more users who care enough to wrap their heads around it and start putting valuable information in it.

Google Wave is an impressive set of technologies, the kind of stunningly slick application that literally makes developers stand up and cheer. I’ve played with the Google Wave test sandbox a bit, and while it’s definitely too complex to live up to the “this will replace email!” hype that greeted its launch, it certainly has some cool features. So the big question is whether Wave will succeed as overall in becoming a popular standard for communications on the web, because Google has made an admirable investment in documenting the underlying platform and making it open enough for others to build on and extend. I think the answer is no, and the reason is because the Wave way is not compatible with the Web way.

What do I mean by “the Web way”? Well, if we look at the history of new technologies being adopted to extend web sites and enhance communications, we see a few trends emerge:

• Upgrades to the web are incremental. Instead of requiring a complete overhaul of your technical infrastructure, or radical changes to existing behaviors, the web tech that wins is usually the sort of thing that can be adopted piecemeal, integrated as needed or as a normal part of updating one’s websites or applications.
• Understanding new tech needs to be a weekend-sized problem. For a lot of web developers, long before they start integrating a new protocol or platform into their work, they hack together a rough demo over a long weekend to make sure they truly grasp how it works. And a weekend-scale implementation on a personal site usually translates roughly into a 90-day implementation cycle in a business context, which is a reasonably approachable project size. (In tech, three days in personal effort often translates to three months of corporate effort.)
• There has to be value before everybody has upgraded. This is basically a corollary to Metcalfe’s Law. While we know networks increase in value as they add more nodes, the nature of web tech is that, in order to be worthwhile, it has to provide value even if the people on the other end haven’t upgraded their software or web browsers or clients or servers. Otherwise you’re shouting into an empty room.
• You have to be able to understand and explain it. Duh.

Now, if we take a look at some examples of what has worked, we can see how various successful technologies have displayed these traits. One great example is feeds. When RSS feeds were new, it was easy to understand their potential immediately, and since I was working at a newspaper at the time, I just spent an afternoon understanding the format and hacking together a quick feed of headlines that anybody could subscribe to. If nobody had adopted feedreaders yet, that was no problem, since there was no cost to just having the feed sit there with no subscribers — the “nobody’s upgraded” problem would only result in me having wasted a few hours.

Ajax had a similar adoption pattern. It took a little bit more time to comprehend, but not much more than an afternoon, and the development effort required for adding Ajax enhancements to an application started as a weekend-scale project and has only gone down over time. Following the principles of progressive enhancement, well-designed implementations performed just fine on older browsers or systems that couldn’t handle the new features. And most sites that have added Ajax features have done so by adding the requirements as a checklist item in the course of normal ongoing updates, not as standalone efforts to migrate to a new technology.

This brings us to Wave. Wave offers excellent opportunities to extend its core features and to add richness to its “wavelets”, and I have no criticisms over its utility as a developer platform that third parties can build upon. But the fundamental Wave protocols are, I fear, a bit too complex to ever be fully and correctly implemented by anyone other than Google. Interoperability is likely to be a challenge that plagues the platform for its entire existence. In short: It’s likely that nobody will ever build a fully-compatible clone of Wave that competes with Google’s own implementation.

Why is that true? Let’s look at what’s built in to Wave:

• Powerful realtime collaboration features
• Unlimited versioning of content
• Built around robust XMPP protocol
• Combines chat, document editing, and message threading — wikis + blogs + comments + IM
• Delivered as a very polished rich user interface

Each of these is a very compelling experience. But a lot of developers’ reactions to seeing them was not just “I can’t wait to use that!” but also “I want to add that one feature to my own existing application!”. And that’s where it gets tough. Let’s take a look at Joe Gregorio’s list of the protocols that power Wave. (Joe works at Google, but made this list before he was working on Wave. I appreciate his research and openness on this topic, and presenting his work here is a tribute to what makes Wave great, not a criticism of his effort.)

• Federation (XMPP)
• The robot protocol (JSONRPC)
• The gadget API (OpenSocial)
• The wave embed API (Javascript)
• The client-server protocol (As defined by GWT)

That’s a lotta stuff! XMPP alone is a bear to implement, let alone to deploy at large scale. (I can’t think of anyone outside of Google, Earthlink and LiveJournal who have deployed XMPP to millions of users.) But if you wanted to make another application that truly interoperates with all that Wave can do, combining all of these pieces would just be the starting point.

And people aren’t looking for a replacement for email, or instant messaging, or blogs, or wikis. Those tools all work great for their intended purposes, and whatever technology augments them will likely offer a different combination of persistence and immediacy than those systems. Right now, Wave evokes all of them without being its own distinctive thing. Which means it’s most useful in providing reference implementations of particular new features.

If a developer wants one of the compelling individual features of Wave, like near-realtime collaboration, they’re more likely to use something like (wait for it…) Pushbutton technologies. The infrastructure afforded by the components of the Pushbutton Platform comes nowhere near the richness and polish displayed by Google Wave. Pushbutton isn’t even designed to offer the benefits demonstrated by Wave. But to its credit, Pushbutton displays nowhere near the complexity of Wave in its interoperability requirements. More importantly, integrating Pushbutton features into a website or application isn’t a monolithic process of building dozens of cutting-edge features, but rather can be deployed incrementally by even non-expert webmasters.

In this context, it might help to think of Pushbutton tech as a “micro-Wave”. As Gina Trapani said in mentioning Google Reader’s support for PubSubHubBub:

Huh-wha? you ask. Yeah, I know. It’s no Google Wave. But that’s what makes this exciting. This kind of small Pushbutton implementation is how real web pages will easily use existing technology to notify one another of new updates. The Google Reader/FriendFeed integration is just the first tiny step in what will be a broad deployment of realtime-enabled sites. These sites and services will let one another know when they have new data to share without the sucky inefficiencies of polling. Check out how fast FriendFeed updates when you share an item in Google Reader in the video above.

In short, it’s almost zero latency.

Why is this clearly “inferior” technology going to win? Well, as just one example, XMPP is way too complicated for any normal human to deploy. Whereas if you’re reading this, you probably already have access to a regular HTTP web server that could talk to a Pushbutton hub. In fact, the only two backers I know who have worked extensively with XMPP are Brad Fitzpatrick and Artur Bergman, who co-created Djabberd. And they are both excited about PubSubHubBub. Realistically, someone like Yahoo might try to do all of this, and inevitably one or two open source projects will try to lash together open implementations of each of these pieces to make a kind of FrankenWave application. There are probably already one or two teams working on the inevitable “Enterprise Wave Server” platforms as well, though I haven’t heard about them myself. These efforts may succeed, but that doesn’t mean they’ll ever be robust enough that people will trust them for communicating on the web.

More to the point, I’m a regular blogger who knows a little bit about scripting on a normal web server. I can poke around the documentation and add a few tweaks to my RSS feed (or, in my case, do nothing and have Feedburner automatically handle it for me), and all of a sudden my blog’s feed is part of the Pushbutton web, ready for others to build on. I literally wouldn’t even know where to start with the Wave developer documentation if I wanted to integrate it with my site or any of the little apps I like to hack on during a long weekend. What seems more realistic — that someone will figure out a way to incrementally build on top of realtime feeds to enable Wave-like experiences, or that all this talk of Waves, wavelets and blips is going to suddenly become easy to understand.

In short, web-way tech like feeds, Ajax and Pushbutton win because people who make good sites and applications have a place to start with it. Does this mean we get fancy realtime simultaneous editing right away, now that Pushbutton exists? Nope. In fact, Wave might even get the early jump on those kinds of features for web apps, simply because it’s pioneered that part of the user experience. But Wave only runs to its full potential on the most cutting-edge web browsers. And there may only be a dozen companies in the world with the in-house expertise to clone the entire complement of technologies underlying Wave in order to make a full-fledged competitor. Worse, the monolithic nature of the Wave experience means it will even be a challenge to make a full-fledged open source competitor to the official Google service.

I hope that Wave succeeds, because I love to see ambition and innovation rewarded. But I think it’s mostly likely that Wave’s success will be in inspiring people to create similarly compelling experiences by adding incremental enhancements to their existing sites. That’s how the web’s always advanced in the past.

Related Reading:

• The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real
• The Pushbutton Web now in Google Reader (from Smarterware)
• My keynote session on Pushbutton, which will be at the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo in New York City.