Harsh Ajmera» googlewave

Google Wave : Where its going Wrong

Harsh Ajmera — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:27:46 +0000

Google Wave is the latest buzz to hit the internet shores. Recently, the Web search giant sent out 100,000 select invites for a limited preview for the app that it claims to be the future of all internet conversations.

I personally dont believe that Google Wave is the new killer Internet application. As of today the app is not a replacement for Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook. Google Wave is instant messaging and distributed editing in real time-collaboration on steroids, but it is surely not the new Twitter or facebook.

Google Wave is total chaos! The multiple writings at the same time and several cursors zipping across the screen is very confusing.

People will take some time to learn how to use it. Its not like Twitter or Facebook where you can pick up and just run with it. It needs to be patient while reading, grokking and working in Waves which takes time.
Unlike social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and others, I can’t see profile biographies or real names, or even manage Wave users and group them.
I miss a draft mode in Google Wave so that I can type without people seeing me. This will also eliminate the distracting cursor.
Once a Wave is released, there is no control over it, no one to manage it. May be, Wave can do better with some Wikipedia-type editorship.
The document format in Wave is based on XML, not HTML so everyone can display it. This will make it more challenging for developers to build other presentation layers on top of the Wave platform.
Google Wave anyone can become my Wave contact. For, there is absolutely no permission required. Anyone who has my user ID, can add me to Wave. I personally may don’t always gonna like that.

These are all the issues or factors which I think Google Wave should improve. If you also had any problems or hurdles please feel free to share them..

Get a Wave embedded in your Website in just 5 min

Harsh Ajmera — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:44:18 +0000

I am assuming that you already have a Google Wave Invite.

Step 1. Please login to the sandbox server. This itself presents a feat, as it is not clear how to do so. There are no links from the API docs to the sandbox server only from the invitation email – I understand the reasoning, but not very user-friendly.
Currently, there is only one Google Wave server -https://wave.google.com/a/wavesandbox.com/.

Step 2. Create a new Wave that you would like the public to see. I use the term public loosely. Currently, it is rather elitist crowd flashing their invites left and right on Twitter. Once you create Wave, notice a small Debug menu link in the top-right corner. Choose the Wave Id menu option, you will need to substitute this in the sample HTML that tutorial provides.

Step 3. There are also couple of useful robots that aid you with the embedding of Waves. For example, Embeddy - embeddy@appspot.com posts a usable tutorial HTML with the Wave ID already substituted for you. Also, there is Madoqua Wave Bot blog-bot@appspot.com that print the id for the Wave you are in (be carful HTML created is using production server that is not live yet).

If you are planning to make available publically, do not forget the bot that allows public access - public@a.gwave.com. Hint: first add this address to your contacts, and then add this bot as a participant on the wave – he will add everyone to your wave.

Step 4. So, finally, you are sick of my rumbling and you have a page that contains HTML similar to what Embeddy posted on your Wave.
Refresh the page, if you get a blank page, most likely you are running Firefox. Firefox(below 3.5) is not friends with HTML 5 and for best results use Safari or Opera.

If the page asks you to login, open another tab, the login process will not redirect you back to your page.

15+ Best Google Wave Plugins and Gadgets

Harsh Ajmera — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:18:21 +0000

Plugins
1.	Wavr	A google wave plugin for Wordpress
2.	Hobbity	A robot to make the urls shorten in the waves
3.	Drupal Waves	Adding Wave to Drupal
4.	Bloggy	Publishes the contents of a wave to your blog.
5.	Grails	Integrate Google Wave Robots and Wave Embed API with your Grails application
6.	Polly	Adding Polls to your Wave
7.	Coin Toss Gadget	Some fun, still useful
8.	Tweety	Tweet from Wave, Live twitter search from Wave and etc
9.	Stocky	To retrieves the live stock price for any stock symbol
Gadgets
1.	Twitter	To activate this gadget just add tweety-wave@appspot.com to your contact list. It will authenticate your Twitter account the first time you use it.
2.	Amazon	To add this gadget, just add amazon-withwaves-com@appspot.com to your contact list.
3.	Musical Wave	A simple extension for music lovers. To add Musical Wave to Google Wave, just add dr-music@appspot.com
4.	Weather	Gives you an idea of weather in the city. To add Weather to Google Wave, just add shiny-sky@appspot.com
5.	Eliza	To add Eliza to Google Wave, just add elisarobot@appspot.com
6.	Bit.ly	To add bit.ly to Google Wave, just add bitly-bot@appspot.com.
7.	Smiley	To add Smiley to Google Wave, just add smiley-bot@appspot.com
8.	Starify	To add this gadget to Google Wave, just add starifybot@appspot.com
9.	Calcbot	To add this gadget, just add calcbot@appspot.com to your contact list

SAP Making Application With Google Wave

Harsh Ajmera — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:53:25 +0000

Google’s Wave communication and collaboration platform is getting early interest from enterprise application vendors like Salesforce.com and SAP.

Both companies have built prototype applications using Wave, which was released in preview mode for about 100,000 users on Wednesday after being available only to developers. Wave combines a range of technologies such as document sharing and instant messaging into a system for real-time collaboration.

SAP Research and the vendor’s NetWeaver development team created an application called Gravity using Wave. In a demonstration video, Gravity is used to develop process models for a hypothetical merger between an insurance company and a bank. Once completed, the process models are exported into SAP’s BPM (business process modeling) software for further refinement.

Meanwhile, Salesforce.com created an extension that employs Wave for customer service. A demonstration video shows how a customer in need of support can use Wave to start a dialogue with an automated support robot. The system also creates a case record in Salesforce.com. If the robot can’t answer the user’s questions, the user can request a live representative, who joins the conversation.

Google is mulling the prospect of a “monetizable wave extension store,” according to an official blog post, through which these applications and others could conceivably be sold.

But while Wave is an intriguing technology, at this point it doesn’t quite meet the needs of enterprises, according to Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady.

“For both ISVs and enterprises, the usability will have to be improved,” he said. “It’s still an intimidatingly new technology for less technical users, so Google would do well to work with potential partners to abstract needless complexity and exposing only the business functionality required.”

Google acknowledged that Wave remains a work in progress in an official blog post this week, saying it “isn’t quite ready for prime time” and noting that key features, such as a draft mode, remain to be implemented.

Google Invites for Real-Time Google Wave

Harsh Ajmera — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:19:30 +0000

Google Wave is opening up to the general public for the first time Tuesday, the company has announced.

Just over 100,000 invitations are being sent out to users who had previously requested access to the web-based real-time communications service on a first-come, first-served basis. Wave invites should be arriving in e-mail inboxes throughout Tuesday night and Wednesday day.

Google Wave is a web-based application that marries multiple forms of communication, including chat, mail and wikis, into a unified interface that runs in one browser window. Everything inside Wave happens in real time: You can even see a comment being made as the person is typing it, character by character.

Wave was soft-launched in May with a public demo at Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco. Access was given only to early testers and developers at the time, however (We were lucky enough to be invited to give it a spin).

Wave solves a unique problem for web users as we deal with the proliferation of web-based collaboration tools and real-time communications services. On one side, you have cloud-based document sharing, photo sharing, wikis and other tools for collaboration. Then there are services built for real-time communication — chat is an obvious one, but other services like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed (which Facebook purchased in August before releasing its code) also aim to make real-time sharing a bigger part of our online experience.

Efforts are ongoing to tie them all together, including the emerging Activity Streams data specification, which makes it easier for multiple real-time services to tell each other what users are posting or commenting on.

But each of these services and tools fills its own niche, and, for now at least, each occupies its own browser tab or, in Facebook’s case, its own section within a website. Wave is one of the only services trying to bring them all together into a unified interface.

“The observation that our communication lines are very fragmented — we’re certainly not the first ones to bring that up,” Wave engineering manager Lars Rasmussen tells Webmonkey.

And it’s also not a problem Rasmussen thinks his team can totally solve. However, he’s confident they will come close enough to make a huge impact on the emerging real-time web.

“Can you invent a single tool that has all the functionality of all the other tools? Maybe not. But in a year from now, we’ll have quite a lot of users who are in love with Wave even if it doesn’t completely handle everything they need for their communications.”

Tuesday’s release is not a general launch. Google is still pushing Wave out gently, so even though well over a million people have asked for access, Google is only honoring a fraction of the requests.

“We tried to invite a mix of people in enterprise, startups and schools,” Rasmussen says. He also says a very small number of paying Google Apps customers will be given access, and anyone involved in the developer tests over the summer will get to keep their access. The Wave team is based in Australia (the reason the launch is happening overnight in North America), and they made sure to give a higher priority to a few Aussie companies for now so they could collect some on-site, hands-on feedback.

Wave isn’t due for a real public launch until 2010. It’s still quite buggy, so Tuesday’s release is more akin to alpha or early beta software than a fully functional service.

“We wanted to give access only to people who have a high level of interest in dealing with preview-quality software,” Rasmussen says.

The team hasn’t been busy adding features. Rather, they feel the core functionality of Wave — the ability to replace things like long mail threads and online document sharing with real-time collaboration, sort of a “chat within e-mail” experience — holds enough value that they’ve simply been concentrating on improving the baseline performance.

“Latency is an obsession of ours,” says Rasmussen.

Some limitations within the browser are keeping Wave from running as quickly as he wants. When a Wave becomes long, for example, it can take awhile to open it. The team is working on a pre-loading system where you don’t have to load the whole Wave to start reading it or adding to it, just the first couple of pages. Then as you scroll, it keeps loading, speeding things up.

Another hang-up, one typical of young web applications, is that Wave slows down after you’ve used it for a few hours. This is due to memory leaks, and refreshing the browser page or restarting the browser solves it. But plugging those holes so browser refreshes aren’t necessary is the obvious goal.

There are two nice improvements in Tuesday’s launch.

First is that Wave is now tied to your regular Google account. Anyone who’s been involved in the sandboxed testing phase over the last few months has had to log in using a test account set up by Google. This account was kept isolated from your regular Google account, so you couldn’t use Wave to collaborate with any of your regular contacts. You could use Wave, but it was a little lonely.

Starting Tuesday, anyone with Wave access can now log in using their regular Google account. You’ll be able to communicate with any of your regular Google contacts who also have Wave access. You’ll also be given eight invitations each to hand out (Google’s calling them “nominations”). Anyone you invite gets put into the request queue.

The second improvement is a new system for installing add-ons. Developers have been busy building widgets that show off the real-time collaboration platform’s powers. Along with making those more accessible, Google has made installing them a simpler, two-click process.

Users will find a Sudoku game where you race against other people to fill in columns and rows in real-time, as well as a trip planner gadget developed by Lonely Planet.

Anyone running Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome will have few problems running Wave. Internet Explorer users who feel things to be a little janky or sluggish should try installing Google’s Chrome Frame extension for Microsoft’s browser.