This article isn’t about that feature specifically. This is about Google+ in general. The new social network that totally isn’t trying to out-social Facebook². It seems quite a hit! But then so was Buzz initially. You remember Buzz? The social network built knee-deep into GMail that a lot of people tried, but no one really liked³. There was also Wave – but that never made sense to most people⁴. I mock, but only out of love. Google, despite their failures are not a company to give up on something once they have it in their sights, and understandably they want to get in on this “social” act.

What “social” means exactly is anyone’s guess, but in vague terms it means somehow putting all that information you generate when you browse the web and share the cool stuff you find with your friends to use. Sites like Facebook are all about giving you a central place to post videos and photos you like so other people can see how witty and clever you are for liking Transformers before they were ruined⁵ by Michael Bay. This sort of sharing has come a long way since the web was made. It used to be that you had to own your own website and manually copy/paste links and videos into your pages and hope to hell that people might find, and occasionally re-visit, your site. Then sites like Blogger and WordPress came along and made that somewhat easier, then Tumblr and Facebook – making those sorts of short and snappy link sharing posts easier and easier to do. Now you wave your mouse in the direction of the Facebook tab and it pulls out that it’s a Youtube video and picks out the title and description and even embeds the video, and you barely have to do anything. Well now Google is heading one step further. They aren’t there right now – Google+ is still a lot like Facebook on the surface – but deeper down the steps are there to become something massive.

Google+ is a service where you share your links, photos and videos with people in your “Circles”. You group the people you know into named Circles to make sharing easier and less prone to accidents of the “sharing photos of myself drunk with Aunt Sally” variety. For example, you create a “Work” circle, a “Family” circle and potentially a “Drunk shenanigans” circle. Then each time you post a picture or a report, you can easily assign it to be seen by the appropriate group. For the record: Facebook offers a similar option, but I’ve rarely used it, and I can’t imagine my mum has ever bothered.

Then there’s the Hangout feature I’ve mentioned above. When you’re online, you can set up your webcam for chats with whichever friends happen to be browsing Google+ at the time.

The third major feature at launch is “Sparks” – a kind of automatic interesting article finder. Type in a few keywords about what you’re interested in, and you get your stream filled with articles that match those keywords. I find this feature somewhat limited at the moment. A few of the articles it’s uncovered have been interesting, but mostly it’s just more of the same sort of thing I can get at one or more of a dozen similar services. Once it’s fully integrated into everyone’s Google account though – like my mum’s – I can imagine it being useful for some people to find new and interesting articles they might otherwise not go searching for.

Thus we get to the crux of the matter: integration. Google practically runs the web right now, despite the valiant efforts of Microsoft and up-and-comers like Duck Duck Go, and despite the sneak-in-from-behind services like Twitter and Facebook. If you want an answer to something you most likely start at Google and work your way from there. But Google recognise it’s only a matter of time before someone takes that “social” power that other sites like Twitter and Facebook have and turn it into a more useful information finding service. The power of social is to hopefully take it one step further and start recommending things to you before you even recognise you were looking for it. To help you dig out more reliable information – reliable because a friend or relative has already used it and shared about it⁶. Google is the biggest search engine on the planet and has been for years. On top of that, Google has sites like Blogger (for web pages) and Picasa (for photos) and – because you might not have actually heard of those – Youtube for video.

Google’s plan with Google+ has already started. You can “Plus One” any search result to indicate to other people in your networks that a particular website is a good result – similar to Facebook’s “Like” button, but on your search page. Now website owners can embed these buttons onto their sites, and you can “Plus One” after you’ve visited – the results are shown to your friends in their Google searches.

The next step will be to turn this functionality on on Youtube and their other properties. When you “Like” a video – soon to become “+1″ no doubt – this will be added to your list of +1s on your profile and I’m imagining eventually integrated into your stream. As more and more Google properties are built onto the Google Plus platform, stuff you have found useful or beautiful or interesting will be offered to your friends and family as reliable content that they might also find useful or beautiful or interesting. It’s all part of Google’s plan to find ways to understand what you do on the web and make themselves more useful so you use them more⁷. It’s a grand vision. It’s easy to imagine this as the start of something big, which is why I’m so excited about it.

Of course at the moment, it’s all seems much like the other services we know and love. This is not a bad thing. The fact that you can take your knowledge of Facebook (or Buzz etc) and move into Google+ is a huge bonus at starting time. If Google can layer more functionality over the top of this simple base, I imagine Google+ being a powerhouse of sharing and a massive database of knowledge.

This is just my initial reaction/summation of Google+. The best way to find out what it’s about is to give it a go. I’ve got some invites if you’d like to try it! Check out my +Josh posts and put me in one of your circles.

Google+ (or Google Plus if you wanna be search-engine friendly) is a post from: First Waves

1. or third?
2. But is really – everybody knows, you guys
3. not really deep down
4. although I never knew why – it was pretty straight forward
5. or exploded
6. It’s also to make advertising more profitable, but that’s another story
7. and see and click on more ads

That left me feeling somewhat foolish, as I’d dedicated a good portion of my time to Wave: joining a group of Wave Watchers((a group dedicated to helping new wave users and maintaining some sense of order in the fun chaos that was Wave)) and maintaining this website. I never expected Wave to gather much support at first, but I honestly thought it would last longer than it did. It certainly seemed to me to have more momentum than it turned out to have.

So when I heard they were killing it off, I was left figuring out what to do with this website. I had a couple of ideas:

1. I thought I could change focus onto some other Google product, but honestly, none of them inspired me all that much: Buzz was a fairly bland FriendFeed clone that I couldn’t use from my normal account and messed up my Google Reader experience.
2. I could shift focus to a non-google product, but similarly, there was nothing all that awesome that I thought had much weight behind it. For instance, Novell’s Pulse was meant to be a Wave-like collaboration tool that was intended to federate with Google Wave itself – but Novell the company just doesn’t have the clout they used to have, and I knew Pulse wasn’t really going to take off. There are so many products out there that do much the same sort of thing, but they’re all these little walled-off social network wannabes.
3. I could continue with the open-source Wave project picked up by Apache. A few people are running with this, and it might be a fun project to monitor but it’s not moving as swiftly now that Google isn’t funding it.
4. I could generalise the focus to any product that might replace email as the fundamental communication of the internet. This would leave Facebook and Twitter and other Buzz-like products. This honestly appealed to me the most, but again the problem with most of these sorts of products is that they all live in their own little worlds and if I choose to use on Twitter for example, then I’m cut off from my wife who might choose to use Facebook.

So I thought about it and then just ignored the problem and hoped it would go away. Plus I started a new job that required a lot of time and energy and in the end, maintaining a website about a product or products that didn’t inspire me just… didn’t inspire me.

But a few days ago, Google announced Google+ (pronounced Google Plus if you couldn’t figure that out). It’s a “social networking layer” built over the top of some of their other products. It has some of the limitations of the products I decided not to focus on from the list above, but it’s got some promise and for the first time in a year, I’m excited about one of Google’s new products again.

So this site will now focus on Google+ for a while – until it takes off, or fails. My next post will explain why I’m excited by this, and why I’m writing about it when at first glance it seems no different to the products on the list. I’m also planning a newbie’s guide to bring non-techies up to date.

If you’re new here subscribe to the site! And if you’re a reader from long ago and my site’s just popped up again in your Reader, then Hi! Welcome Back! Thanks for sticking with me so long! Things are gonna ramp up around here!

It’s good to be back.

Get excited again! is a post from: First Waves

In a guest post on the Huffington Post, Lars explains:

For this reason, today we opened up Google Wave to everyone. You no longer need an invitation to use the service. Simply go to wave.google.com and sign right in. Likewise, if you administer a Google Apps domain, you can now easily enable Google Wave for all your users at no extra cost. Google Wave is now officially part of Google Labs, the same place my team launched Google Maps close to 5 years ago.If you tried Google Wave earlier and found it not quite ready for real use, we think you’ll find that a lot has changed, and now is a good time to give it another look.

Did you catch that second part? That was the other half of the announcement: Google Wave is now live for all Apps for Your Domain accounts! If you are using Gmail or Google Calendar on your own domain name, you can now use Google Wave too, and it integrates fully with the normal Google Wave experience. Those of you who have been waiting for this since launch, or since Linkoping University announced it for their students, well wait no more!

It took about 3 hours from the announcement to being able to add Wave to my own domain account. Setup is a breeze. Click the “Add more services” link on your App Dashboard to install the Wave Preview. Then get Waving!

Don’t forget to Wave @ me and add josh@nunnone.com to your Wave contacts.

Google Wave Live and Available for Everyone! Including Google Apps users! is a post from: First Waves

In addition to this, the Wave This function has an official Chrome Extension. Install the extension, and you can send any page to Wave with a click!

Finally, you can also use an undocumented Wave This feature to add a Wave contact button to your sites. At the top of my page I’ve added a “Wave @ me!” button that starts a new wave with me as a participant so you can easily contact me in Google Wave. To add the button to your own site it’s as easy as filling your details in the code below:

<a href="https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=Contact+via+[Your-Site-Name]&r=[fill-in-your-@-wave-address-here]" title="Contact me in Google Wave" class="vt-p"><img src="[your-button-image]" alt="Wave at me!"></a>

The &r parameter for adding a recipient isn’t listed on the API page and support might be pulled or altered so use at your own risk. Additionally, be aware that the Wave This function currently defaults to the Google Wave Preview account only, so if you use a different client (a Google Wave for Domain Apps account for instance, or Novell Pulse) you’re out of luck for now.

So there you have it! A new API, an awesome function, and my modest widget. Have at it! Make some buttons!! Start spreading Wave!!!

Wave This API released. Plus Official Chrome Extension and Bonus Unofficial WordPress Widget is a post from: First Waves

• Make waves I’ve started a slightly different colour (like sites where the author’s comments are shaded slightly blue).
• Don’t show icons at all in the inbox/searches (or make it easy to show and hide).
• Let me tag or bookmark specific blips within waves and make it obvious from the inbox which waves have “starred blips”.

Now this post wasn’t started just as a gripe against something I’d like to see changed – I’d like to hear what things you’d change about wave if you could. I’m not necessarily talking features we know might come (like the recently switched on “Remove” button). I mean interface and behaviour changes that don’t make sense to you, or made sense at first, but don’t now you’ve used it a bit. What are your specific gripes and revolutionary ideas that would make using Wave more of a delight for you?

Wave is constantly in a state of flux, so there’s every chance the feature you hate might be altered in future. So get your pet peeves out here in the comments or on this post’s sister wave (embedded)

[wave id=“googlewave.com!w%252BPia29cqgA”]

Get Your Wave Peeves Off Your Chest! is a post from: First Waves

This is a big deal for Google Wave. The button has been there since the beginning, but grayed out and unusable. It’s taken some of the shine off Wave that until today you were unable to recall waves or remove people added accidentally.

It works in a pretty straight forward way. You decide someone should not be a participant any more and you click remove. The person who is removed sees a big red X on the wave in their inbox and opening the wave shows the last thing they were able to see before you removed them. If you remove them before they even open the wave, they won’t even know it existed!

Part of me balks at the idea of removing waves right out from under their noses if they haven’t opened them. It feels somewhat dishonest – but it’s actually just fixing a email shortcoming! I think we’ve gotten so used to the idea that once something is sent, it can’t be unsent that it feels a bit weird to actually be able to do it again. Keep in mind though that this probably isn’t foolproof. If for example someone’s waves become “unsynchronised” while you are removing them from the wave, they might still see it – leaving you thinking that you got to it in time.

Another big issue in the months since launch has been Wave abuse. Waves have been destroyed by malicious (and accidental) addition of bots, or overwhelming the wave with large amounts of spammy text. At the moment, the best way to deal with this has been to reduce the abuser’s participation to “Read-Only” and report them to the abuse team. This remains the best way to halt an ongoing attack, but now it’s also possible to clean up after an abuser by removing the sign they were ever there in the first place.

Remove: Remove Yourself! Remove Others! is a post from: First Waves

Lars Rasmussen on Google Wave via CNET UK.

Told you so

Lars Rasmussen talks to CNET UK is a post from: First Waves

But I realise that many people do want up-to-the minute Wave information, so I’m going to lay out the sites and people I follow, and if you’re a hardcore Wave nut, you might like to follow them too. These people all have my utmost respect and admiration for their writing and dedication to Wave. I’ve included these sites in a Google Reader bundle called Best Google Wave Sites. If you trust my judgement, you can use the bundle to subscribe to all twenty-two feeds in just a couple of clicks! If you’d like to know more about the sites though, read on!

Wave Users – Hints and Tips

First and foremost, you cannot go past the Official Google Wave Blog – written by Googlers with news information and tips. If you only subscribe to one other site (ahem), this should be it. It’s kind of a no-brainer though so lets move on to some less obvious sites.

The Shiny Wave by David Cook takes a look at useful waves, gadgets and bots as well as the latest important technological developments that could impact Google Wave. Once a month he profiles the work of a talented Wave developer, and generally keeps a close eye on the Wave development community.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave Alright, this isn’t a site to follow so much as a book, but it’s written by the enormously talented Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. The site includes the entire book for you to read for free, or you can get it in PDF or full colour print versions for a very small fee. If you’re just getting started in Google Wave, there really is no other site you need to get your head around it.

Google Wave Information by Pooja Srinivas (a Googler) is a compilation of Wave guides Pooja has written. The focus is on brand new users who might find something like the Complete Guide (above) too complicated. It also covers some unusual and fun use cases for Wave.

Waving At You by Russell Tripp is where Russell puts all his tips and information on Google Wave to “ease the learning curve” as he puts it. Waving At You and Russell’s Twitter account are where I found a lot of my favourite Wave resources. His tips are simple, but always excellent.

Waverz uses waves themselves to create the articles. Using the wavearchive@appspot.com bot, an archived html copy of a wave is made (at http://archive.waverz.com). You can then embed this archive in a page using some simple javascript (or php or python on the back end). Beyond this technical marvel though is an insightful site written by a number of Wavers including one of my fave wavers Jon Blossom and Dragon Silicon, who’s work I’ve only just discovered while writing this article.

Google Wave Possibilities by Tim Brown is another excellent source of Wave news. Tim is a “Wave Watcher” – a group of Wave helpers – and for good reason. His site is full of helpful information (like how to get started with particular bots), and Google Wave news.

Wave on Business is focussed on how businesses might use Google Wave. The site incorporates presentations, use case scenarios and information on collaboration.

Google Wave Book by Andrés Ferraté is a companion site to the books Getting Started with Google Wave and Google Wave: Up and Running. It is more than just a catalogue for the books though, and contains insightful posts with tips and ideas.

Riding the Wave by Prasun Nair has Wave news, but mixes in some news about other communications technology such as telephones. The posts cover Wave news and information on its future direction.

Google Wave Info. The latest news and information about Google Wave by an anonymous author. Some useful information.

Wave Developers

These sites are run by Wave developers for Wave developers and contain a mix of the technical and informative. If you would like to dive in to the nuts and bolts of Google Wave, these are a few of the best!

The Google Wave Developer Blog is the official blog for Google Wave developers. It’s full of tips and guides and helpful information for developers who are just starting out with Wave and for Wave gurus too.

Google Wave Samples Gallery is the go-to place for new robots and gadgets as they come out. Primarily a teaching resource, the extensions here are tagged with how well they will teach you the concepts behind developing for Google Wave. An excellent source of useful bots too!

On Top of the Wave by Kiwibcn is a site run by a team of developers to showcase their experiences developing for Google Wave. One of their most popular posts is how to Develop your first wave robot in Java and clearly demonstrates their knowledge and their ability to teach.

Wave.to by @waveDOTto is the home of the developers of the excellent Mr-Ray extension, plus many more. These guys clearly know their stuff, and they are passionate about sharing it with the developer community and the public.

With Waves are a team of four developers who have created a number of popular extensions including Amazon and eBay bots that insert product listings into waves when you mention them. They have also released their Extension Generator that they use internally to build their own robots. That’s generous!

Mastering Wave by Daniel Graversen follows the process of developing for Google Wave, as well as highlighting important Wave news and tips. This site is one of the first Wave sites I subscribed to.

Process Wave is written by seven software engineering students, and follows their process of developing from Invity, a group management bot, to a collaborative modelling tool integrating the open source ORYX software into Wave.

Go Wave hasn’t been updated for little while now, but has some good information about Robots, Gadgets and Embedding.

Google Wave Sites by Region

The following Wave sites are written for specific communities and are often in another language. This should not be a problem. I speak nothing but English, but thanks to modern internet translation software have no trouble reading and participating in these sites. If you subscribe to these sites in Google Reader you can use the built in translation function and you should have no troubles whatsoever.

Spanish

WAVEsfera by David Alviz. David was an enthusiastic commenter here on First Waves, so I followed him back to WAVEsfera and discovered his site was in Spanish. Realising I was missing out on some excellent tutorials and news I subscribed as soon as I remembered that Google Reader does instant translation! I’m glad I did – David updates almost twice daily (!) and is an endless font of knowledge and excitement over Wave. Without David, I’d probably be missing out on all the other excellent non-English wave resources below.

German

Google Wave Surfer by Thomas Friebel has news and information with particular focus on the Wave experience and how it is changing over time. The site also includes a forum for users to share their wave experiences.

Wave Inside by Sascha Ahlers has shorter updates than Google Wave Surfer, but they are no less informative. A good resource for quick news.

French

Google Wave France is maintained by three authors who explore Wave use cases and report updates and changes as they happen.

Russian

Google Wave Russia by Vadim Barsukov has some in-depth articles from Q&A sessions with Lars “Google Wave” Rassmussen. Some of the content appears to be English articles translated to Russian, but there is some original content too.

Everything else

Of course, this list is not meant to be complete. There are authors I’ve not met, site’s I’ve not found and tweets I’ve not seen. There are sites like Smarterware or Read Write Web that often cover Wave news, but aren’t dedicated to covering Wave. As I come across articles like this, I’ll add them to my “Further Wave Reading” list over on the left. I also re-tweet interesting Wave articles from @firstwaves on Twitter. If you really want to be in the loop, follow my Twitter list of Wave Geniuses too!

I’ve also left off a lot of good resources and people that can be found on Google Wave itself, as that will take another post entirely. Ping me if you’d like to chat, and I’m sure I can help you find some great people, and useful resources.

If you know of some great Google Wave resources I haven’t covered, please let me know in the comments below!

The Massive (but not Exhaustive) List of Wave Resources is a post from: First Waves

https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=[insert title]&c=[insert content]

Using a bit of PHP in WordPress and a plugin called Samsarin PHP Widget (that allows php in a special widget) I created the Wave This! button over at the side. Feel free to use it!

The PHP I used was as follows:

<?php if ( is_single($post)) {
$excerpt = urlencode(get_the_excerpt());
$posttitle = urlencode(get_the_title());
?>
<a href="https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=<?php echo $posttitle ?>&c=%22<?php echo $excerpt; ?>%22"><img src="http://turbo.firstwaves.org/wavethis-button-dark.png" alt="Wave This!" /></a>
<?php } ?>

Simply install and activate the plug-in. Add the Samsarin widget to your sidebar and past the code in as you see it. It will only appear on post pages (not the front page).

I created a couple of button images you can feel free to use:

So that’s the new Wave This! button. Go ahead and give it a try. If you’re a developer I’d be interested in seeing other ways to implement this.

New “Wave This!” Function and Buttons is a post from: First Waves

Google Wave is a product that’s trying to do something massive to the way we communicate online. Its stated goal is to be what email might look like if it were invented today. A number of other services are labeled as competitors to Google Wave, including the recently updated Google Docs (which is too new for me to comment on in this article), but I wanted to take a look at which of these services are real competition. Below are the services who show the most promise at becoming the next generation of online communication.

Microsoft Sharepoint

Microsoft Sharepoint is a suite of content management tools to maintain and collaborate on documents. While it was never sold as a replacement to email, it was held up as one of the products Google Wave was meant to compete against. But as Steve Gaitten of Bamboo Nation points out, Wave competes with Outlook, not Sharepoint.

It might be possible for Microsoft to transform Outlook in some significant way that expands it beyond email into some sort of super email client. It might even integrate it into Sharepoint a lot further. The truth is, email is Google Wave’s biggest competition. It might be outdated and rough, but it’s the most popular form of communication on the internet. If anything stands a chance at beating Wave, it’s the service that Wave is trying to beat. If email innovation can keep up with user demand, it might just remain the top dog for another 40 years. If Outlook can maintain the large slice of the pie it has, while innovating on top of email it could still be competing into the future.

Novell Pulse

This is exactly the kind of “competition” Google was hoping for when they built Wave. As I’ve said before, Wave’s only hope of replacing email is federation. Only by giving users the choice of Wave provider will users find one that works for them. Novell Pulse might even become a more loved Wave client, and I think that would actually make Google happy. Personally, I’m eagerly awaiting a Pulse preview account.

SAP Streamwork

This tool was touted as a Google Wave competitor while in Beta (with the code name 12Sprints or Constellation).

The tool turns out to be a collaboration space for making decisions. It’s not a complete replacement for email, but I’m not sure that was ever their intention. Streamwork allows a team to collaborate and add gadgets to enhance the process.

“It was clear we needed to work together,” Meyer said. “We’re excited about what they’re doing, they’re excited about what we’re doing.” Users will be able to share content between the two platforms, he said.

David Meyer, reported by Computer World

It will be interesting to see what sort of integration they build into it.

Shareflow and Toqbox

Much like Streamwork, these tools are not marketed as email replacements, but were both touted as Google Wave competitors. What they do is allow users to collaborate on documents in real-time. If these sorts of services were better integrated into email (perhaps using GMail’s new oAuth tools) they might be more likely candidates. Otherwise they are really only competing with Google Docs and others of that kind.

ccBetty, Syphir, Etacts, Xobni, Rapportive et al.

Products such as ccBetty and the others mentioned enhance email. They exist to remove the holes in email by providing additional information, embedded media, faster searching, or simplified discussion. Some work on GMail, others on Outlook, others work outside any email service by CC-ing a special address onto each email you wish to turn into a discussion. The problem with all of these tools as competition for Wave is that the email protocol just doesn’t take these sorts of tools into consideration, so they’re limited by how many services the developers can write for. That is, each service might support Outlook or GMail, but not all the other smaller players in the marketplace. Where Google Wave has this model beat is by including extension support from day one, allowing developers to enhance Wave in whatever ways they can imagine. Any service that federates with Google Wave will also support these extensions, making it a truly open, extensible experience.

EtherPad

This collaboration tool gets its own special crossed out spot because it was one of the strongest, simplest competitors in the collaboration space, but was bought by Google! The developers have obviously since been put to work on Google Docs, as evidenced by the announcement of the recent update.

Facebook.

This one scares me a little. In some ways, Google Wave is the anti-Facebook. Where Wave is built on open technology, uses an open protocol and federates with other services, Facebook is a “walled garden” and keeps users inside their service. Both systems let developers make extensions and apps that use the platform, and Facebook seems to be slowly inching towards including some of the collaboration features that have been missing so far. Facebook has a huge user base, and could easily become some sort of defacto go-to communication platform for the masses. Currently though there are no obvious moves to open up the platform further, making it unlikely to catch on in business, where email still rules.

Twitter (+ Buzz and other Social Public Messaging)

Currently, none of the services in their current form pose a threat to email – they’re too limited with their 140 character limits and lack of in-line collaboration. But Twitter (or a more open version of it at least) is the product I think has the most real chance of beating Google Wave at becoming the communication platform of the future.

A distributed network (integrated with Twitter of course) that updates in real-time, with an API could have many people needing their email less and less. Once you can get updates from your favourite companies and all your friends are on the service, why would you need it? Throw in an extension or two, enhanced private messaging, and you have a very compelling product that could steal users away from email. The platform is so new, no one really knows where it could go in the future, and I suspect it will give Google Wave and traditional email a run for their money. It could be Twitter, or Buzz, Status.Net or a new player we’ve never heard of, but the idea has the strongest traction of any I’ve seen.

Something completely new

So those are my thoughts about Google Wave’s true competition. Of course, a company could come out of the blue with a product so completely new and exciting it amasses a huge audience that completely abandons email. This is the least likely of all I think, as I’ve stated before I think Wave is our best chance at replacing email wholesale. Alternatively, email will be killed by slow changes to the next generation of social communication. The chances of it happening are dependant on the whims of companies who are trying to make a buck, not replace email so I’m not holding my breath. Email will be replaced by something federated, open, extensible and easy to use. I’ve taken my best shot at predicting what it could be.

What are your thoughts? Is Google Wave our best hope, or is there something even more obvious that could take email’s place?

Image by JEFFREY’S MURALS

8 Google Wave Competitors is a post from: First Waves