For dedicated geeks, there are browser extensions, OS specific software, iPhone Push notifications, and more.

But most of these don’t figure in the non-geek arsenal for managing the wash of information from the internet. And for regular folk convincing them to use Wave without these sorts of notifications will be hard simply because they don’t want to bother checking for new waves as well as new emails.

Convincing them may have just gotten easier however with the release of integrated email notifications for your Wave inbox. In a post on the official Google Wave Blog, Ged Ellis explains how to turn on email notifications for new waves. Using the drop down list next to the inbox link (it’s hidden until you hover over it) you can choose an email address to have notifications sent to. The tool even picked my Google Apps email even though it’s not my official Wave address because I’ve set it as primary in my Google profile.

In the Google Wave Blog Ged goes on to say:

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.

Ged Ellis, Software engineer, Google Wave Team

Perhaps this feature was always on the cards, or maybe it was a reaction to the waning interest in Wave from the geek community. By making it easier to get notifications people might start inviting friends who might otherwise be uninterested in another tool to check. I know I’ll be inviting my wife and a couple of buddies that I’ve previously thought might be uninterested thanks to this addition.

However it’s still a long way from the ultimate integration I see is necessary for Wave to finally catch on — using Wave as a full email client. As long as email and waves are two separate entities in two separate products there will still be two places someone must visit to get both the old (email) and new (wave) forms of communication. Notifications via email just makes this more obvious. Ideally Wave should be usable as a hub for all sorts of communication. Currently the closest we have to this ideal is email, but it’s dependent on services sending out notifications. With Wave, the potential for any third-party to integrate services via bots and gadgets gives Wave a clear advantage.

All said though, the notifications are a welcome addition, and will make convincing friends and family to join that much easier. Time will tell if it helps Wave get the consistent user numbers it needs to take off.

In my post yesterday I noted the increased push by the Wave developers to make it easier for the wave community to build and deploy extensions. It turns out this flurry of activity coincided with the imminent release of Version 2 of the Wave API, announced today.

The first new feature is the:

Active API: In v2, robots can now push information into waves (without having to wait to respond to a user action). This replaces the need for our deprecated cron API, as now you can update a wave when the weather changes or the stock price falls below some threshold. You can learn more in the Active API docs.

Google Wave Developer Blog Announcement.

If I understand this correctly (and I’m not a developer so correct me if I’m wrong) this means that before today, a robot in a wave might have had to wait until a user opened a wave before it could refresh the information in the wave (updating stocks etc), now the robot can initiate a wave update itself, making it possible to have robots create new blips in response to events. This is a much smarter way for a robot to behave, and should make for far more interesting and functional bots.

For a more enlightened perspective from a wave developer, check out Mastering Wave’s take on the announcement.

So what I initially thought was just a push to get developers involved was actually leading to an announcement of a massive upgrade to the API. In the end though, the aim is the same — to get developers engaged and creating interesting software to make Wave an indispensable tool.

Google Wave Developer Blog: Introducing Robots API v2: The Rise of Active Robots.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/avoiretc/ / CC BY 2.0 ]]> http://firstwaves.org/google-wave-births-active-robots/feed/ 0 http://firstwaves.org/google-wave-births-active-robots/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/firstwaves/~3/0q-MUMCaRSY/ http://firstwaves.org/submitty-and-gadgitty-two-bots-to-help-wave-developers/#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 03:57:33 +0000 Joshua http://firstwaves.org/?p=229477467 Recently, the Wave Team have made a big push to publicise more bots and extensions. In a post to the Google Wave Help forum, Kylie announced that some users might start seeing a new Extensions link in their navigation panel. Then enterprising Wavers noted that anyone could get access to this Extension information with a search for [group:google-wave-extension-gallery@googlegroups.com].

Now Google have made it easier than ever to submit an extension to the Wave Extension review team using a simple bot.

Create a new wave and add the Submitty bot (submitty-bot@appspot.com), and Submitty will create a submission form for you to fill out. At the bottom are a couple of checkboxes. If you check either of these boxes, you’ll be prompted to fill in more information about your bot and/or gadget. Finally, you add the Extension Review Group (google-wave-extensions-review@googlegroups.com) to your wave to submit your extension.

By making this process easier, the Wave team hopes to encourage development of extensions to rapidly build up an ecosystem around Wave. Without a varied and useful set of apps, Wave will remain no more than a fun experiment.

Which also explains their dedication to an extensive and open API which they continue to enhance with supporting bots. In addition to the Submitty bot, they have released Gadgitty, a bot for editing your gadgets inline and seeing the results straight away.

Between these two bots and the others submitted by the Google Wave APIs Team, it’s obvious how important developers are to the creators of Wave, and I hope it spurs further experimentation from the wave community.

We have begun testing remove participant internally and hopefully it will hit externally within a month

Lars Rasmussen, one of the lead Wave developers.

In a Wave entitled “Google Wave User Black List”, Lars piped up to offer advice on the best way to avoid and take action against known trolls and abusers and offered the above titbit about the imminent release of the ability to remove participants from Wave.

This is big news for Wave, and one of the most important features noticeably missing from the Google Wave interface. Wave abuse, trolling and destruction are all unavoidable realities of using Wave at the moment, and although usually infrequent, can significantly lower the enjoyment and tone of a Wave. Unfortunately, while every one can agree that a removal tool is necessary (and there’s an unusable greyed out button to show that the Wave team think it’s important as well) it hasn’t been implemented yet. One of the reasons for this delay must be the extraordinary thought and research that must be put into such a feature, to make certain that the feature itself is not abused. Care must be taken to see that users who are added and then removed retain some control of their legitimate contributions within context. The ability to remove people from such a collaborative space is an enormous can of worms, and one that most people would agree is important enough to get right the first time.

The wave that Lars opened up on was created to list known trolls and spammers.

• Once you have added public with full access, making an abuse user read-only is more effective than removing them from the wave will.
• There will soon be a way for you to report abuse directly to our internal abuse team
• The feature you are asking for: block a user from a particular wave and all future waves created by you is exactly right but it will take us many months to get there…

Further feedback from Lars

This is tremendous news, and along with the ability to make participants read-only, and even score them with karma give users a powerful arsenal to shape the Wave experience the way they want.

Hat tip to The Shiny Wave: Google Wave User Black List.

Add the Karma Gadget and Bot to your waves and use it to rate your users (out of five stars). If users get consistently low scores, they will be automatically kicked from Waves that choose to turn on this option.

Of course there are some potential problems with such a tool: if a user expresses unpopular views in one wave and gets poor ratings, they might find themselves banned from any future wave that uses the tool, regardless of the subject. If the tool took off in popularity it could be quite horrible to find yourself on the end of such banishment.

On the other hand, if the tool doesn’t get popular it would be unreliable for crowdsourcing opinions, letting in known trolls who had just not been rated on enough waves.

Despite these shortcomings however, I would love to see this developed further (and even be integrated as part of the official spam-fighting tools of Wave), as I see great potential in harnessing the opinions of others in keeping waves free from known trolls and spammers.

One potential use case is the immediate banishment of those frustrating bots that pop up all over the place (Kanye-bot anyone?). I’m uncertain whether bots are in the firing line (Karma-Bot itself seems immune and doesn’t show up in the rating gadget). I’m also unclear about what happens if something like the public group (which can be rated) gets consistently bad reviews.

As of writing, the gadget does not carry out bans and won’t until Google implement the kick-out feature. I will be following this tool as it develops, and I’ll be looking for opportunities to use it. And if you see me on a wave that uses Karma, please be nice!

Karma: A Reputation Rating System for Google Wave Users.

Take the URL http://antimatter15.com/misc/read/? and tack on the wave ID you want to publish, and BAM! a simple published wave. For example: “Things to do in Adelaide”, a wave put together by Taryn Hicks. It’s shiny and blue, and the information is easy to read without needing a Wave account. In addition the creator has made it possible to publish a private wave, simply by adding the gwavereader@googlewave.com bot to the wave!

A tool like this should be an official feature of Google Wave. One of my biggest concerns is that as wave becomes more popular, people will begin to publish tonnes of handy information as waves only (this has already begun). The problem with the current embedding tools are that they require the reader to have a Wave account, and just as importantly a browser that can handle Wave. Sadly this is the opposite of the open and free web the founders of the Internet envisioned. But with tools like the Wave Reader, we’re on the way to getting simple, clean HTML pages of information the way we’re accustomed to. To generate some clean HTML you can use to make a totally static page out of a wave, add &html=0 to the URL.

So head over to the Art of Wave Reader to get a good idea of how to use the tool and pick up a bookmarklet that will open your current wave in Wave Reader. You can also download the code. You may notice it’s now up to version 5.2 (the blog post was about 4.6) and is a marked improvement from even a week ago, now making extensive use of HTML5 and CSS3. Wave Reader is released under a GNU General Public Licence v3.

I can’t recommend Wave Reader highly enough and wish a feature like this was baked into wave. It’s fast, good looking, and very useful.

Well, with the release of the Read-Only feature, you can now specify select users and groups as read-only participants, meaning they can see your waves in production, but can’t edit them themselves. Perfect for the thousands of informational waves that are available, particularly those that might not have been edited in a while but might be ripe for archiving. To make a user or group read-only, simply click on their icon and select read-only from the new drop down box.

The second feature is one of the other most requested tools — the ability to restor a wave to a former state. Those destroyed and damaged waves I mentioned? Now they have a chance of resurection, without the annoying cutting and pasting that went with the process before now. While playing back a wave, click Restore when you’re at the point before it all went pear-shaped. You won’t lose any data, as the state will be copied to the end of the playback and you can still see the changed that were made after that point.

Between these two new (some would argue vital) tools, Wave becomes more than a novel real-time experiment, and begins to take shape as the useful documenting, collaboration tool it always promised to be. Of course, there are still more changes needed before it becomes a reliable collaboration tool (revert single blips, read-only main blips with posting rights) and the team promise much more in their announcement post, but this is a terrific first step.

The service does not yet allow you to add users by their googlewave.com account (gmail.com only), and the permissions can only be handled through the Google Groups interface. It also seems that to avoid spam (being able to send messages to an everyone in a public group at once) users must pro-actively seek out the group wave and follow it to move it to their inbox [currently waiting for confirmation of this].

Like any Wave feature, this is still being developed and its behaviour could change over time. The Wave team have said they will continue to enhance the groups feature to make groups easier to navigate.

Waving with groups — Google Wave Blog.

While attempting to complete my first group assignment as an external student at University, I realised how much harder it was than while I was an internal student.  If you’re an internal student you see each other at least once a week,  making it hard to ignore the fact you have an upcoming assignment. Also you actually get to meet and talk with people and elect  to be in their group (if the group selection process is left to the students). Being external, I had to post a random post on the discussion board and hope I was choosing the right people. And then hope they didn’t ignore my emails or wait a month or so to reply.

Google Wave would have been one of the best tools for this group assignment. Email meant a group of four people were all individually emailing each other and also at times emailing all four of the group. I ended up with snapshots of what was happening, who was having what role, and what the plan was. With Google Wave, all the communication would have been in one Wave, or even multiple, but it would have been available for the group to read and to add and edit. The plan of the assignment, of who was writing what, and how we were writing it could have been kept at the top of the wave, and edited as needed. The parts assigned to individuals could have been put in the wave and the group could know exactly where the assignment was up to, and edit other’s parts as we went.

The two main features of Google Wave which would have positive affects on a university group assignment, would have been the real time editing and the ability to highlight. Real time made it more like conversation, without having to wait for emails to be sent, or having to work out who could possible meet in the City to catch up. Highlighting would allow those edits to be prominent or for individuals to reinforce any point they needed to make.