2009-10-09 Google Wave Preview Tips and Tricks

Collected field notes

This a small collection of must-know Google Wave facts, tips and tricks.

browsers

Google Wave works in all major web browsers. It even works in Internet Explorer thanks to the Chrome Frame plug-in (see Chrome Frame Basics).

However, not all browsers are created equal. Google Wave uses quite a lot of memory. It is not unusual for the Task Manager to show that Firefox is using six hundred megabytes of more. Most of today’s PC have one or two gigabytes, so that is a hefty chunk of memory.

It seems that Google Wave’s memory demands are smallest when run inside Google Chrome. If your system is more sluggish when using Google Wave, try running it in Google Chrome - or add some extra RAM.

Some things don’t work

Google Wave truly is in preview. At times, things do not work.
And I do not just mean that you may need to refresh the page, or even restart your browser. Some things you might expect to work do not work either. Right now (early October 2009), Bloggy and Polly, two bots that were demoed during Google Wave’s introduction do not work.

I discovered this the hard way. After the recent article about Tweeting from Google Wave I wanted to do another one about blogging from Wave, but could not get Bloggy to work. I even went back to the developer sandbox, but did not get it to work there either.

I then searched the public waves (see below) for mention of Bloggy, hoping to find out about any problems others encountered and any solutions they might have come up with, only to find widespread confirmation that Bloggy is resting and Polly is pining for the fjords.

keyboard shortcuts

Google Wave supports keyboard shortcuts. You will probably find yourself using some of these with thinking about it, as most shortcuts match existing Windows conventions. you’ve probably used the Up/Down arrows keys to scroll through a wave already, or use the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V shortcuts to copy and paste text. A full list of keyboard shortcuts in provided in Google Wave help.

space ahead

The most important not immediately obvious keyboard shortcut you should know about is the space key; when reading an updated wave, press the space key to jump to the next unread blip.

Finding Waves

When you are just starting out with Google Wave, your inbox may seem rather empty, even when you select All from the Navigation menu. The trick to finding a lot more is to search for public waves.

Searching for public waves is easy, but you have to know how. Just enter with:public in the search box and watch your Inbox fill up.
To stop showing all those waves, either type in:inbox manually or just click on the Inbox menu item on the Navigation menu.

Wave being a Google product, it should come as no surprise that it has extensive search capabilities, that you could write a small book about. Google Wave Searching provides an overview of the extensive set of search operators.

If you browse through that overview, you’ll notice that the with:public operator does not really ask for waves that are public, but for waves with a participant called public. This decidedly odd approach has to do with the way you make a wave public.

Making Waves public

You make waves public by adding the special user Public as a participant to the wave.
To do so, you first need to add Public to your contact list. Its email address is public@a.gwave.com, but when you try to add that to your Contacts, you hit a snag.

Google Wave Add Public When you try to add public@a.gwave.com, the Add a new Contact dialog will tell you that User does not have a Google Wave account and the submit button remains greyed out.

The trick to adding Public anyway is to ignore that message and simply hit the Enter key at this point. You may want to try and remember this particular address, as it may disappear from your Contacts list between sessions, simply because it isn’t a recognised a Wave contact.

getting rid of waves

When you decide to view a wave, it is automatically added to your inbox. You do not need participate in the discussion, you only need to view the wave for this happen. This may make it easy to find waves you’ve viewed, but also fills up your inbox with lots of waves you have no further interest in.

There is a toolbar along the top of each wave. You can inform Wave of your disinterest in a particular wave by clicking the Mute button on that toolbar. Muting a wave moves it from your inbox to your archive - and keeps it there, even if the wave is updated again. To really get rid of a wave, and even remove it from your archive, drag and drop it to thrash.

finding waves in a particular language

There are waves in many languages. A little known trick is that you can filter waves by languages. To do so, you use the same language codes as used in HTML. For example, you’d use with:public lang=nl to find public waves in Dutch. Google Wave: Search Dutch Waves

saved search

Google Wave supports many search operators, so searches can become pretty complex. To make things easier, Wave allows you to save searches.

If you click the Add button next to Searches in the Navigation panel, you will be presented with a dialog box that allows to enter a search query and a name for that query. If you just performed a good search, click the Save search button in the lower right corner to get that same dialog box with the query already filled.

Not everyone is human

In Google Wave, every contact is know by an email address, but not every contact is human.

In Google Wave, everyone is know by an email address, but not every contact is human. It is well known that Tweety and Bloggy are well known, but some other bots might fool you. Have some fun with Eliza the Robot (elizarobot@appspot.com), a Wave version of the famous Eliza program, created by Anne Veling.

A Starter collection of bots

This is just a small collection of assorted bots. There are many more bots, both useful and funny, and new bots continue to be created.

bot	email address
Bloggy	`blog-wave@appspot.com`	posts wave to a blog
Eliza the Robot Shrink	`elizarobot@appspot.com`	artificial lack of intelligence
Polly the Pollster	`polly-wave@appspot.com`	takes polls
Sweepy	`sweepy-wave@appspot.com`	cleans up waves
Swedish Chef	`borkforceone@appspot.com`	Bork, bork, bork!
Tweety the Twitbot	`tweety-wave@appspot.com`	lets you Tweet from Wave
TwitUsernames	`twitusernames@appspot.com`	links user names to twitter names

There are various list of bots in Wave and on the net. I expect Google to add a bot directory (perhaps even a directory bot?) to Wave before going public with Wave.

bottiquette

There is a little but an important bit of bottiquette that you need to know: do not add bots to a public wave. Adding bots to public waves tends to create havoc, so just don’t.

Different bots cause different problems. For example, as Tweeting form Google Wave points out, adding Tweety to a public wave allows everyone to tweet on your behalf.

Like many good rules, this rule has a few exceptions. Sweepy is one exception.

bouncing bots

Google Wave: Bouncy (You gotta problem with that?) It is possible to bounce bots from a wave. It used to be that you had to add the Bouncy bot (bouncy-wave@appspot.com) and then command it to bounce a bot, but you do not need to do so anymore. Bots have a remove button now, so you can bounce bots from waves by clicking their avatar and then choosing the remove button. You can even bounce the Bouncy bot now; just choose that Remove Bouncy button.

Sweepy

The Sweepy bot (sweepy-wave@appspot.com) is a bot you should add to public waves. Sweepy cleans up waves by removing any empty blips that are added. It currently does not remove already existing empty blips. This is a good thing, because it is relatively easy to accidentally create one.

Save a crashing Wave

Even with Sweepy cleaning up obvious errors, it is still very easy for a public wave to get messed up by lots of newbies who do not know yet what they are doing - and there is no undo.

You could cynically conclude that this proves how useless Wave is, but the solution to this Wave problem is Wave itself. One of Wave’s cool features is that it includes versioning and playback. Wave defaults to showing you the latest version of a wave, but it can show all earlier versions and even play all changes back to you. So, just play back the wave, pause at a version you like, and then copy and paste that version into a new wave.

read-only waves

The Welcome waves are read-only, so it is only natural to wonder how you can make your own Waves read-only. The current official answer on that is that you cannot.

embedded waves are invisible

It is possible to embed waves on web pages. However, only visitors who already have a Wave account will be able to see the wave, so this is not very useful yet.