With all the discussion about the new Google Wave platform, one of the main points I am seeing that keep getting raised and not fully addressed is:
What do I do with Google Wave?
The Basics
If you are not familiar with Google Wave yet and if you have an hour and 20 minutes to kill, I would first suggest heading over to the Google Wave web page and watch the Developer Preview video that was done at the Google I/O 2009. It should clarify quite a bit about the basics.
Google’s description of Google Wave is:
…an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more
So to make it simple, a wave is one part chatroom, one part wiki, one part blog, and one part forum, all mashed together, all in one linear row where participants can all take part in, contribute to and expand on, all at the same time, in real time.
The Developer Preview video does a good job in presenting what the basic behaviors are currently, as far as being a private communication tool, but one of the really interesting aspects of Google Wave, at least I think, is the ability to make a wave public.
What this means is that instead of just the wave only being accessible only by small groups of invited people, making a wave public makes it accessible by anyone. It can be discovered via a search, or you can even embed the wave on web pages, so that anyone with a wave account can contribute. [click to continue…]
One of the really exciting possibilities of the new Google Wave platform is the ability to embed waves on your websites and blogs. Picture it kind of like Wordpress comments on steroids. Or maybe like a mini Wiki chatroom, only more slutty…
Easy to Install
To make a wave public, you just have to add public@a.googlewave.com as a participant to the wave and it is wide open to the world to ravage and do as they please with.
Then simply by using a Wordpress plugin called Wavr, a little help from a tutorial I found here, I was able to figure out what my WaveID was and then just slapped that sucker right here in the post as seen below.
Unfortunately what you are seeing now is a screenshot of the wave instead of the real thing, because in order to see the live wave, you need to be logged in to Wave itself, and since so many people are still waiting for their wave invite, I felt it would be best for now to just show the example.
Warning! Danger! Danger!
Now before you go slapping your waves all over the web, keep this in mind.
Currently, Google has not implemented any permission settings to waves yet. What this means is that anyone and everyone can add to and edit a public wave. The wave has no inhibitions, so anyone can comment whatever they want, add applications, change anything, say nice things, bad things, delete things, spam… sooo naughty… and scary.
So, while full of future potential, it is probably a good idea to wait until the public version comes out and see if they add permissions. I hope so at least… Regardless, I just wanted to share because I think it’s super cool.
Why is the theme song to the Never Ending Story going through my head now?
I look forward to your input.
