Google Wave – The Future of Email?

Joshua Price — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:18:05 +0000

Google’s not afraid to reinvent the wheel, as long as they think they can make a better wheel. So far, in my opinion at least, they’re usually successful. That being said, when I first heard about Google Wave, the new browser based communications system, I was skeptical. I like my emails, IMs, message boards and blogs the way they are. Could Wave really transform the way I communicate online? Could Google really reinvent email in a way powerful enough to pull me from my beloved GMail? Well through my massive underground operative network I was able to get one of the beta invitations to try out Wave for myself.

So what is it exactly?

According to Google:

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.

Intriguing, but not very specific. Suffice it to say, each “Wave” is like an email thread or message board post. The difference is that you’re not just posting a series of replies (though you certainly can use it that way), you’re making changes to a single document. Each change becomes a branch of the original message. You can roll a wave back in time to see how the conversation has evolved. If you get added to a pre-existing wave, you get the whole thing – the document (or thread) as-is, along with its entire history. Waves can be embedded into blogs, so any time a change is made to that wave it can show up in something like Blogger in near real time. We’ll cover the most interesting Wave features in more detail as we go.

Using a Wave

The Wave exists online, and can be accessed a few different ways. The most common would probably be through a “Wave Client”, ie a GMail-like web app that displays your Waves in the browser window. Here is an example of the main wave.google.com

On the far left we’ve got a pretty familiar webmail style menu, with the usual Inbox, etc. Below that is your contacts. Wave seems to have imported my GMail contacts and added those who are also signed in here. The center pane shows your message history much like any email client, including the pic for each participant in the wave.

Things get more interesting when we get to the right pane. Here we can view, edit, and create waves. In this example, I wrote a Kurt Vonnegut quote to Crystal. She responded not by creating a separate reply, but by editing my original words. When I get back to Wave and see her message, Wave highlights the changes she has made.

This means you could use a single wave to have multiple people, say, write a paper for school or collaborate on a family Christmas list. All changes are essentially real time, each change creating a new branch with a complete backup history. In fact, Wave provides a playback feature that allows you to step through the document from creation to the present.

Extensions

Wave expects and encourages user-developed extensions. As it’s still in development, there aren’t many choices yet. The extensions that do exist are all fairly useful. First, you can perform a Google search and include the results in the wave. No real surprises there.

Next is the single-click Yes/No box. Of all the things to include in an early release I’m a little surprised the Yes/No box was one of them, but I suppose it demonstrates some of the things you can do with extensions.

The results were unanimous.

There is also a Maps extension, which is another single click surprise. I have to admit, this would make it a lot easier to exchange directions.

As I write this, a new wave just arrived in my inbox for the Google Wave Extension Gallery. I can browse and install new extensions from within the wave. Presumably the wave will be updated as new extensions come out.

Conclusion

There is FAR more to Google Wave than I could possibly cover here, and this is still a fairly early development version. For those who want all the details, you can find a LONG (80 minutes) video of the tech demo here. For something with so drastically different from email on the technical side, Wave manages to feel surprisingly comfortable. The technology is certainly impressive, and it’s easy to adjust to the Wave way of doing things once you’ve spent a few minutes using it. As for usefulness, that’s a little harder to judge. From what I’ve seen, Wave only works if everyone else is also using it. As great as the map feature may be, the recipient would of course need to be a Wave user as well. Not that this is a flaw in Wave exactly, but it does place a limit on how useful it can be. I think it’s got a lot of potential, and I’ll be keeping a Wave tab open for a while to see how things go, but I won’t go closing my webmail tab just yet.

Google Wave – The Future of Email? originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

10 Must-Have Plugins For Windows Live Writer

Damien — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 06:26:37 +0000

I am not a lover of Microsoft (especially Windows), but if there is any application from MS that I love, it has to be Windows Live Writer.

Other than its user-friendliness and great integration with the various blog platforms, the thing that attracts me most is its ability to extend its functions with plugins (that seems to be the trend nowadays). With plenty of useful plugins available at the Windows Live Gallery, I have no doubt that this is the most powerful blog editor around. The ten plugins below are my favorite and in my opinion, a ‘must-have‘ for all WLW lovers.

1. word count plugin — This feature is included in the technical preview of the latest version of WLW, but as of the current version, you have to use this ‘Word Count‘ plugin to count the number of words in your post.

2. Insert video plugin — Inserting video into your blog is now make easier with this plugin. Simply paste the video link and the plugin will automatically convert it to a presentable format.

3. code snippet plugin — This is a useful one for techies, geeks or web developers who frequently have to place code snippet on their blogs. While there are several other ‘insert source code‘ plugins, I find this to be the best.

4. Flickr4Writer plugin — Tired of searching high and low in Flickr for the picture to place in your blog? Flickr4Writer will definitely make your life much easier. Simply input the tag and it will fetch you all the images from Flickr with that tag. All you have to do is to select the images and insert into your post.

5. Insert Wikipedia link plugin — Highlight some text, click the link and you can turn it into a Wikipedia link. A simple plugin, but definitely an useful one.

6. SnagIt Capture plugin — Do a screen capture of your system and insert it into your post.

7. Website capture plugin — As its name implies, this plugin do a screen capture of a website (specify by you) and insert it into your post.

8. Insert Quick link plugin — Instead of having to click on the Insert Link in Live Writer, you can now bring up those options just by pasting a link into Writer with this plugin.

9. Amazon Book lookup plugin — Search for a book in Amazon within WLW and insert the image and affiliate link into the post. You can save the trouble of going to and fro Amazon and WLW.

10.Template plugin — A simple plugin that allows you to create template of links, scripts, text, or snippets that you can reuse it again and again.

Other plugin that should have make the list:

Blog This For Firefox — This plugin adds a button to Firefox which starts a new blog post prepopulated with content and title from the current web page. It allows you to blog quickly when you find something of interest on the web. (Reason for exclusion: This plugin is not compatible with Firefox 3)