Google Wave – need invites?

Look like I am again late about Google Wave. May be the reason is there are lesser known people inside and not many online on wave to talk to for the same reason. People like me might not be logging into their Google wave account just because they feel that they might get disappointed again by not getting more names in their friend list. After logging into it today, I found the situation been changed a little. Google wave has been opened up more.

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“ Since Dec 07, 2009, Google has not only given one more million Google Wave account to people requesting for them, but also has increased the number of invitations, one could send out for others. Although the exact count is not specified, but I think it must be 17 more invites added in your box, where it was 8 initially. ”


wave

Anyone, who is yet out of luck with Google Wave Account could get it from me by making a nice critic comment here on this post. Obviously, not everyone will get invites, but I have 24 invites in my bag to give out. May be your words get lucky.

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More about Google wave

Facts about Google wave continues ….

Do you know your Google Wave ID (like mine is contactfornitish@googlewave.com) is nothing sort of Email ID means no one could send an email over the same address and only waves could be sent over the same.

Do you know Wave uses your regular Google Account’s contact list means if any of your contacts are also using Wave, those people automatically show up in your Wave Contact List.

Do you know the best visible difference between a Wave conversation and Email conversation is that you can add contacts anytime later on and they could follow the conversation fro right there and could read the earlier lines etc. Means not needed to be CC from start if it was case of email.

Do you know even if you don’t have any contacts online in Google Wave, you can go for participating public waves anytime with typing the special query with:public and it will return a firehouse of constantly updating waves like the case of twitters. A better luck would be targeting your query over particular topic like with: public firefox, which will return wave related to firefox only.

Do you know A Wave can show more than one cursor working within a given wave as well, which means active waves with lots of participants could be a treat to watch with multi-colored names typing text before your eyes… live. I guess watching multiple people typing within the same document would be the most new and electrifying experience for most of the people. 🙂

Do you know although not available right now, but Wave will offer a feature that you could stop showing your typing (i.e. blips) means you could complete your typing and then press the button and your sentence; the blip will appear at once. This will be called as Draft Mode and is one of many features, which are not available in preview mode

Do you know Wave is not something completely browser independent. Wave uses recently developed web standards, such as HTML5, to perform a lot of its behind the scenes magic. So, for the richer experience from Wave, you need a browser having full support to HTML5 like Google Chrome, Firefox 3.5+ or Safari 4.

Do you know there are three ways to edit a wave

1. Reply below a Blip.
2. Reply inline within a Blip
3. Edit the existing content of a Blip.

Do you know as of now, Internet Explorer can’t run Google Wave properly as it doesn’t have support to HTML5. Although Google has released an open source browser plugin for bridging the gap. Wave prompts Internet Explorer users to install the same plugin in following way.

GoogleWave for Dummies

Do you know As of in early stages of it, Google Wave is struggling about Mobile devices as most the mobile browsers are not fully supporting to it and one could get it only after avoiding the warning of browser not supported.

Do you know your Wave Contact List is a subset of your Google Account’s exisiting Contacts list and you can add people to your Wave Contacts List only if they already have a Wave Account.

Do you know as of now, there is no way to remove a contact from a wave once added with the exception of bots.

Do you know as in theory Google Profiles are the same as Wave profiles and so you could edit yours to have links, hobbies, photos for the same.

Do you know every time a wave updates, it moves to the top of your inbox and its subject line turns bold. Wave’s instant, real-time notifications are a double edged sword; wonderful when you’re waiting on important updates, terrible when new information you don’t care about distracts you. the achieve and mute buttons can help you clean out your inbox and silence chatty waves one by one.

In the similar ways like emails, waves could be marked read or unread and also could be arranged within folders and subfolders.

Do you know although was available as a privilege to blog posts only, now tags are part of waves as well and playing the same role as was in case of blog posts. Tags provide a more free-form way to file your waves. Unlike folders, you can add as many tags to waves and also unlike folders, anyone participating could see those tags.

Do you know as of now, Wave doesn’t recognize special search characters like square brackets, parentheses, currency symbols, the ampersand, the pound sign and the asterisks. It also doesn’t recognize partial or similar matches, so a search for “travel”  doesn’t find “travels”, “traveler” or “Travle”.

Do you know If your browser has the Google Gears plug-in installed, you can drag and drop files from your computer directly into your wave. (Gears comes with Google Chrome for Windows and its freely available to install on Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari for Mac).

Do you know If your wave contains multiple images, then an Images button appears next to the Files button on the bottom of that wave. Click the Images button and Choose View as Slide Show to easily flip through the photos at their full size.

Do you know how can we can make a wave public? Here is the trick. Add the public@a.gwave.com wave ID to your contacts list the way you would any other contact (although you will get the warning that user doesn’t has any Google Wave Account but you need to continue anyway). Add the same ID as participant to any of your wave and your wave would be a public wave right then.

Now finally, do you know the keyboard shortcuts with Google wave. Here are some

Navigation Shortcuts
Up/Down Arrows Moves you up and down the blips in a wave.
Home Takes you to the first blip in a wave.
End Takes you to the last blip in a wave.
Space Takes you to the next unread blip in a wave.
Page Up/Page Down Scrolls a panel up and down a page at a time.
Ctrl+Space Marks all blips "read" when focus is on the Wave panel.

Wave Editing Shortcuts
Enter
Replies to a blip at the same level of indentation.
Shift+Enter (in view mode) Replies to a blip at the end of a wave. The new blip appears at the same
indentation level, at the very end of the wave.
Ctrl+E Edits a blip.
Shift+Enter (in edit mode) Ends your blip editing session (same as the Done button).
Ctrl+B Bolds/unbolds selected text.
Ctrl+I Italicizes/unitalicizes selected text.
Ctrl+U Underlines/removes underline from selected text.
Ctrl+G Adds color to text via "poor man’s rich text" pop-up, in which you can type a color name (like "blue" or "red") or enter the hexadecimal HTML color code.
Ctrl+K Adds a link.
Ctrl+[n] Makes the current line a heading, where [n] = 1 through 4 for different sized headings.
Ctrl+5 Adds bullets.
Ctrl+6 Removes formatting from text.
Ctrl+7 Left-aligns text.
Ctrl+8 Right-aligns text.

Navigate Image Slide Shows
Space+Right Moves to the next slide.
Shift+Space Moves to the previous slide.
Down / Page Down Moves to the next set of thumbnails.

Rest will come up as I learn more and more about Google Wave.

The Google Wave Book

Google Wave: Finally I am introduced with it

Google wave; the all big buzz and I was failing to reach it as I was lazy enough in the start, when it was first declared long back. Yes as per wiki, Google wave was first declared really long back in the Google I/O conference on May 28, 2009.

wave

I went after it, only when my brother Dewashish asked me for an invite to Google Wave. I tried to know the definition and my search ended over the wiki

It’s a communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, spelling/grammar checking, automated translation among 40 languages, and numerous other extensions. Initially released only to developers, a "preview release" of Google Wave was extended to nearly 1 million users beginning September 30, 2009, with the initial 100,000 users each allowed to invite from twenty to thirty additional users.

I tried to digg little bit more deeper and got one more line Google Wave is designed as a new Internet communications platform. It is written in Java using OpenJDK and its web interface uses the Google Web Toolkit. (Same GWT behind new interface of Orkut).

Ok! I am leaving all these lines from external sources and coming up from my own. For me, its something like Google’s implementation of Wiki. As Google says, its a hosted XML Document: the wave, which could be edited by any of the person involved in the conversation.

I would like to present my first Google Wave conversation with the person, from whom I got the invite. May be you all get some idea of my learning about this in raw….

 

Sachin: Hey, Nitish, So You got the invitation!

Let me know your experience.

Me: Yes I got it and trying to know exactly what this is?

The experience is nice till now and as much I got to know then its not an email tool, but could be said as Google’s implementation of Wiki. If you understand that what wiki is then you could understand that what Google wave is and what Google is trying to achieve with it.

Sachin: This is new email tool, cannot understand yet, once we get more and more people involved may be we will get to know the utilization. There are lots of things, We can use lots of social networking things. but definitely start ….

Me: hold it for a second, I want to object. Although Google’s definition says that it has something to do with Social Networking, I will strongly object. Its not another Orkut or facebook or MySpace. Its more like Wiki. Your conversations are an Open XML shared Document, which anyone involved could edit and the editing would be completely logged and visibly real time.

Wiki was a Document which anyone could edit, it was a concept which was earlier much opposed that such an information would not be reliable as anyone could edit in wrong ways, but later on over years, as Wiki got success it was proved that if one could edit it for wrong then more people could edit it for right ways as well and so Wiki worked and worked in such a tremendous ways that now they are kind of most reliable source of information for everyone.

I guess Google wave is something like that. A fully rich document (pictures, links, ppts, videos and all type of rich media you know), in which Google is making full use of Google Docs and its strength of real time communication. Now people join in .. have their documents online and these documents will be shared over the users participating the conversation and such document will move online to become some dynamic source of information

People knowing Team Softwares and Wiki will get a true idea about what Google wave.

Sachin: I am looking for more like corporate communication through google wave. What do you think?

Me: Yeah … you are heading in exactly right direction… first use will be sure Corporate communication, and specially software developers or project handlers as corporate is already using some of such things, and could relate this faster than others.

Main target is to create collaborative documents, which will hold dynamically changing information from more than one sources, which will be edited to suit with the facts more and more and will come up with an ultimate information source.

I would recommend all of you to go through the tech crunch article for the details. Wonderfully detailed article about Google wave.

I also came to know about a few books over the same topic Google Wave and the leading one, which is online for free is http://completewaveguide.com/

I gone through a few of the pages and found them short enough to keep the interest and info. Take a look.

The other books, which I am aggressively looking for, are books from O’reilly publication with the title Google Wave: Up and Running and Getting Started with Google Wave. Although till now, no luck in finding a free copy of the same.

I managed to find somehow a PDF calling itself as Google Wave for Dummies. I guess, its the same arranged PDF version of the Completewaveguide. Could take a look over the PDF Book for the best info available for my side.

updates: 6th December 2009 

After many days of receiving invite, now from 2:38 PM of today, I also got the power to invite 8 more and I have started using the same. 🙂

Google wave invite

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Other related links:

http://mashable.com/2009/11/14/google-wave-use-cases/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave

Tech Crunch Article