Comienza a Usar Wave

From The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave

Now that you know what Wave is, it's time to take it out for a spin. If you've already used Wave, skip ahead to Chapter 5, Dive Deeper into Wave.

The first release of Google Wave is a limited access, invitation-only preview. If you haven't used Wave yet, this chapter covers how to get an invitation to the Wave preview, set up your new Wave account, find your way around Wave, and create your first wave. Learn the three different ways to update or edit a wave, and find public waves to participate in. Get ready to start putting Wave through its paces.

Get an Invitation to the Wave Preview

The Google Wave preview is not open to the public. It's accessible only to people who have received an email invitation to try out the system, so new users interested in Wave can't just go the the Wave homepage and register for an account. If you haven't been invited to Wave already, there are a couple of ways to get the golden ticket.

If Someone You Know is Already Using Wave

Google handed out over 100,000 invitations to the Wave preview on September 30th, 2009 via email to users who had expressed interest in trying it.^[1] Each person invited in the initial round also received eight invitation "nominations" to share with their own contacts. If someone you know is already using Wave and still has unused nominations, that person is your best bet. Ask her to nominate you for an invitation by entering your email address onto her nominated invitee list. Note that the invitation won't come instantly—it could take anywhere from a day to a few weeks. Google is working its way through the nomination queue at a rate that keeps pace with the Wave preview's server capacity. However, a nomination from an existing Wave user is the speediest way to obtain an invitation.

If You Don't Know Anyone Using Wave

If you don't know anyone already using Wave who can nominate you, you're still not entirely out of luck. You can request an invitation directly from Google at their aptly-named Request for invitation to Google Wave signup page.^[2] Slowly but surely the people who express interest in trying Wave are getting invited in. But don't wait. Interest in Wave grows by the day, so the sooner you request an invitation, the better.

Get to Know the Lay of the Land

Once you've snagged an invitation to Wave, you're ready to register, log in, and go for a ride. Here are a few important details worth knowing before you jump in.

Your Google Wave ID Is Not an Email Address

When you register for your account at wave.google.com, you use your Google account credentials—i.e., your you@gmail.com or you@googlemail.com email address—to claim your new Wave ID. However, your Wave ID will be something like you@googlewave.com. Even though your @googlewave.com ID looks like an email address, it's not: you can't receive or send email from or to that ID. People can only wave you using that address.

The Anatomy of the Wave Client

Now that you've registered, it's time to log into Wave and get your first glimpse of the Wave client. The default Wave view is a three-column, four-panel layout. From left to right, the first column includes the Navigation panel on top (like Gmail's sidebar with links to your Inbox, Sent, and labels) and Contacts panel below it (like your Gmail Chat buddy list). The second column is the Search panel, which contains a list of active waves in your Inbox by default. The third column is where you can start a new wave or open an existing wave.

Figure 2-1. The default Wave client consists of three columns and four panels.

When a panel's contents are long enough to require it, the panel gets a scrollbar on its right side that's a little different than the scrollbars you might be used to. (You can see it on the open wave in the third column in Figure 2-1.) To use the scrollbar, click its up or down arrow to move it, or click and drag the entire scrollbar to scroll. See Chapter 6, Master Wave's Interface, for more on the Wave scrollbar.

The Anatomy of a Wave

The Wave client layout isn't that much different than a three-column email client. However, an individual wave is much different than an email message. Waves have more structural elements than flat email messages do, so there are new terms to describe them. We'll use this terminology throughout the book, so it's important to understand what the different elements of a wave are called from the get-go.

A wave is made up of distinct, threaded conversations known as wavelets. Participants can create multiple conversation threads within a wave, so a single wave can contain several wavelets. Each wavelet, in turn, is made up of a several distinct messages called blips. When you select a single blip, Wave outlines it in green. Blips are like a single message in the midst of an email thread in Gmail, except blips are editable by any participant in a wave.

Figure 2-2. The anatomy of a single wave with two wavelets and five blips, adapted from the Google Wave API Overview.^[3]

In Figure 2-2, the wave contains two wavelets. The first wavelet has five participants and three blips; the second has only two participants and two blips. (The second wavelet has only two participants because one initiated a private conversation with the other to plan to "bail" on the rest of the group without hurting their feelings.) When you click the New Wave link or button, you're creating a wave that contains a single wavelet with a single blip, to which you can add content.

Make Your First Wave

Wave is fundamentally a document collaboration tool, so it's not very fun or useful if you've got no one to wave. Chances are that whoever invited you to the Wave preview appears in your Wave contacts list when you log in, so that person's a good first person to wave. Otherwise, you can try out Wave by participating in public waves.

If One of Your Contacts is Already on Wave

Wave uses your regular Google account's contacts list, so if any of your existing Google contacts is also using Wave, those people automatically show up in your Wave contact list. (For more on Wave contacts, check out Chapter 3, Manage Your Wave Contacts.) If you don't have any contacts using Wave—that is, your Contacts panel is empty—you can still test out Wave. Skip to the next section to see how to join a public wave.

If one of your contacts is already in Wave, you wave with that contact in a couple of ways:

1. Click the New Wave button at the top-left corner of the Search panel, or click the New Wave link in the third column of the Wave client. Wave opens a new, empty wave in the third column. Type in your first message and click Done. Once you do, Wave prompts you to add participants with a drop-down contacts menu. (This same menu displays any time you click the + (plus) button on the top of a new wave.) Click a contact to add him or her to the wave.
   

   

   Figure 2-3. You can add new participants to a wave by clicking the + (plus) button.
2. Alternately, in the Contacts panel, click a contact's icon, then click the New Wave button on their profile panel. Type your message, then click Done.
   

   

   Figure 2-4. Search for contacts and start a new wave from the Contacts panel.

Once your new wave has another participant, you can see that person's icon in the light blue area near your icon at the top of the wave. That wave appears in the participants' Inbox(es) the moment you add them to the wave (even if you haven't typed a message yet). Once you start typing, other participants can enter and update the wave at the same time. Congrats, you're waving!

Even after your wave conversation and updates are well underway, you can add any new contact to it at any time—again in a couple of ways. Let's say you've already started a wave with Mal, but you realized halfway through that Inara might have something to add to the conversation. Make sure the wave you want to add a contact to is open, then either:

1. Click the + (plus) button on the top-left of the open wave and simply search for the contact you want to add. Wave autocompletes your contact search results as you type, so once it finds the person you're looking for, you can either hit Enter to add that person to the wave or click the contact with your mouse.
2. Drag and drop anyone from the Contacts panel over to your open wave to add him or her to the conversation.

Remember, your ability to add contacts to a wave at any point in your conversation is one of the great perks of Wave. If this were an email, you'd need to CC a new contact to pull someone new into a conversation, then they'd have to piece together the conversation from the bottom up like some sort of esoteric puzzle. With Wave, the conversation is all laid out for your new contact, and she can even play back the wave from the beginning to catch up. (See Dive Deeper into Wave for more on Wave's playback feature.)

If None of Your Contacts are on Wave

Google Wave is in a limited, invitation-only preview, so there's a good chance that the first time you log into Wave you won't have any contacts to wave, or the person who invited you isn't online and the wave you create seems just like a sent email. Using Wave is the best way to understand how it works, so even if you don't have anyone in your Contacts list to wave real-time, you can still find and participate in public waves live any time of day or night.

Type the special query with:public into the Wave search box (located at the top of the Search panel) and press Enter to find public waves that everyone on the server can see and participate in. This results in a dense, moving sea of public waves that are updating in real-time, right in your Search panel. If you see a wave that looks interesting, click it to join in. It opens in the third column. The with:public query returns a firehose of constantly-updating waves, and while it's interesting to watch, you'll have better luck finding a public wave you're interested in participating in by adding a keyword to your public search, like with:public Firefly. (See more details on how to narrow your wave search results in Chapter 4, Find and Organize Waves.)

Figure 2-5. Find public conversations using the with:public search.

Once you start waving in real-time with other participants, you can't ignore Wave's most eye-popping feature: its ability to display multiple participants' cursors working live and in real-time on a given wave. You'll also notice comfortable similarities between how Wave works and how your current email and instant messenger tools work.

The Initial Wave Experience

Most people's first reaction to Wave's real-time updating capabilities is somewhere along the lines of, "Whoah!" Watching multiple people type into a wave, live on your screen, is an exciting, new, and sometimes disorienting experience. Not only does an individual wave update before your eyes, your Inbox shifts as the waves in it change. Also, the most common first use of Wave isn't document collaboration—it's chat.

Watch Multiple Cursors Type into the Same Wave

The first time you're reading or adding content to a wave at the same time one of your contacts is editing that wave, something interesting will catch your eye: Wave displays a participant's changes to that wave in real-time, keystroke by keystroke. Within the blip, a colored cursor, labeled with the owner's name, moves through the text as that person types, as shown in Figure 2-6. Wave can show more than one cursor working within a given wave as well. Wherever you see this cursor on your screen is exactly where that user's cursor is on his screen. Active waves with lots of participants are a spectacle to watch, with multi-colored names typing text before your eyes, live.

Figure 2-6. When someone else is editing a blip, you can watch their cursor move around in real-time as they type.

Watching multiple peoples' cursors work on a single document at the same time is a new experience for most people. As you type, you may feel self-conscious knowing that your contacts can see your every typo in real-time. It's interesting to watch someone's thought process unwind as they type in a conversation; it can also be a time-sucking distraction to see every keystroke as it comes over the wire, versus receiving a finished chunk of text in one shot. Most importantly, seeing cursors update live helps you avoid stepping on other participants' toes while you collaborate on a single blip.

For example, if you're working on a document with coworkers for a big presentation at work, you don't have to deal with frustrating workplace servers and document locking that restricts editing to one user at a time. In Wave, you can edit a document at the same time as any collaborator because that document is a single, hosted conversation, and you can see what your collaborator is editing by simply looking out for their cursor.

Live, multi-user documenting-editing is a feature that may be familiar to programmers who've used a special breed of collaborative text editors, but for most of us it's completely new, novel, and, yes, sometimes a little scary. If you never get used to the idea that someone may be watching you type—or you occasionally want the privacy of drafting a blip without someone looking over your metaphorical shoulder—Wave offers a Draft checkbox next to the Done button on every blip. Currently the Draft checkbox isn't available for use. But when Wave drafts are available, ticking that checkbox will let you complete typing a blip in private rather than displaying every keystroke as it happens. (Draft mode is one of many feature that aren't yet available in Wave. See Appendix A, What Wave Can't Do, for more on missing and upcoming functionality in Wave.)

New Message Notifications and Your Wave Inbox

Like an email client, Wave notifies you of new blips and changes in waves. In your Inbox, waves that have changed since you last looked at them display the blip subject and timestamp in bold text. It also highlights the number of changed, unread blips in green.

When you open that wave, you can identify unread or changed blips by looking for the vertical green bar to the left of the blip. Click an unread blip to mark it as read, and the green bar fades away and the unread count changes in your Inbox or Search panel.

Figure 2-7. Unread waves are indicated in the Search panel by bold text and a green callout displaying how many blips are new or have changed. Inside a wave, a green line to the left of a blip indicates that it's new or has been edited.

Wave as Instant Messenger

At first, Wave can feel overwhelming, especially if you're trying to understand it as a type of tool you already know—such as email, a document collaboration tool, or instant messenger. Wave combines features from all three of those types of tools. During your first few Wave sessions, most likely you'll use Wave like an instant messenger—particularly if you start a Wave with another contact who's also online. You compose a blip, someone else replies, and pretty soon the conversation you've started feels like a familiar, linear, IM conversation.

It's only natural that you'd use Wave like it's an instant messenger when you're first getting started, but you're only scratching the surface.

On the other hand, if you're sending messages to contacts who aren't currently online and actively participating in the wave, Wave starts to feel a lot like email—especially if everyone replies to every blip directly after it, in a straight line. What you'll find, however, is that the more comfortable you get with different methods of replying to and editing content in a wave, the better you'll understand how Wave is different from email and instant messaging.

Three Different Ways to Update a Wave

You can update a wave in three different ways, and the method you choose varies depending on context. Sometimes you'll want to reply directly beneath a blip in response to that blip; other times, when you want to reply to a single section of a particularly long blip, you'll want to reply to text inside a blip; finally, if you're collaborating on the contents of a single blip, for example, you'll just edit it directly.

Reply Below a Blip

Whether you're riding a wave with a friend or you've found a public wave to participate in, take a moment and read through the wave you've joined up with. See a blip you'd like to reply to? Hover your cursor over the bottom edge of any blip and a thin blue box with a blue arrow pointing down on the left appears. Click that box to reply to that individual blip. When you're done, just click the Done button.

You can reply this way below any blip, regardless of where it is in the flow of the wave. A lot of the time you'll reply to the most recent blip at the end of a wave, but if you reply to a blip in the middle of a wave, Wave displays your reply nested between the blips before and after it.

Figure 2-8. You can reply to any blip by mousing over the bottom of it and clicking the blue box. If you reply to a blip further up in the conversation, it displays as a nested blip.

Reply Inline within a Blip

One of the more powerful features of Wave—and one that sets it apart from email—is that you can easily reply inline to any piece of text within a blip. Say for example that Kaylee has composed a long, 10-point argument detailing why she thinks Mal should pony up to buy a new catalyzer for the ship's engine. Rather than reading through the entire essay and replying to each point in another long, flat response, Mal can reply inline to any piece of text in Kaylee's original blip.

To reply to text inline, double-click the last word in the section of text you want to reply to. Wave displays a small box next to the highlighted text with Reply and Edit links. Click Reply and Wave inserts a nested, inline blip exactly where the reply should be—next to the text it's referring to.

The official Wave documentation claims you should select the text you want to reply to and then double-click the selection,^[6], but that's not quite accurate. If you select text and then double-click the selection, you're actually just highlighting the word you double-click, and Wave sets the cursor at the end of the word you double-clicked instead of at the end of your text selection. So skip the whole selection bit and just double-click the last word in the section of text you want to reply to.

Figure 2-9. Reply to specific pieces of text within a blip.

Edit the Existing Content of a Blip

What separates Wave from email even more than inline replies is that anyone can edit any part of a wave. You may have started a blip, but any participant on a wave can join in and edit any of the text you've written. You can edit the text of a blip in two ways:

• Click the small triangle icon next to the timestamp on the upper right corner of a blip and click Edit this message. Wave makes that blip editable and you can add your own text. (Note: You can also edit your own blips this way.)

• Alternately, you can highlight text—like you did when you were replying inline—but instead of clicking Reply, click the Edit button. The only real difference between starting your edit using the highlighting method rather than the method above is that when you click Edit, Wave places your cursor directly at the end of the text you highlighted.

Figure 2-10. You can edit a blip at any time by selecting Edit this message from the drop-down menu next to a message's time stamp—whether you initially wrote it or not.

Unlike other methods of participating in a wave, editing the existing content of a blip does not create a new blip. There's no outline of your text, no username displaying what text you added, and no special indentation showing an inline reply. Still, you can always tell when more than one person has edited a blip by looking at the top of the blip. Wave displays the avatar and name of every user who's edited that blip.

The Best Browsers to Access Wave

The advantage of using a web application to communicate is that you don't have to install any software—you can access it from any browser. However, with Wave, there are some caveats. Wave uses recently developed web standards, such as HTML5, to perform a lot of its behind-the-scenes magic. That means Wave provides a richer experience than you'd expect from a lot of web applications, but it also means you need to use a modern browser with full support for HTML5 to use Wave. Wave-compatible web browsers include:

• Google Chrome ^[7]
• Firefox 3.5+ ^[8]
• Safari 4 ^[9]

To get the richest Wave experience possible in supported non-Google browsers (i.e., Firefox and Safari), you should also install the Google Gears plug-in.^[10] When installed, Gears enables features like drag-and-drop image and file uploads from your desktop to your wave. (Google Chrome ships with Gears already installed.)

Chrome Frame in Internet Explorer

Take a quick look at the list of Wave-compatible web browsers. Notice anything strange? The most commonly used web browser on the planet, Internet Explorer, doesn't have native HTML5 support, so it can't run Wave properly.

What do you do if you're in a restricted environment where Internet Explorer is your only option? Google has released an open-source browser plug-in for IE called Google Chrome Frame.^[11] Chrome Frame puts Chrome's page rendering technology and JavaScript engine inside IE to run Wave and other HTML5 web applications. Chrome Frame won't kick in on every web site you visit. Web developers have the option to embed a piece of code in web pages that tells Chrome Frame to take over for IE—and that's exactly what Wave's developers have done.

Figure 2-11. Wave prompts Internet Explorer users to install Google Chrome Frame to access Wave.

If you visit the Wave site using IE, you are encouraged to use another browser that supports HTML5, or to install the Google Chrome Frame plug-in for IE. It is a free download, but you need rights to install it on your computer, which may rule out some locked-down, corporate workstations.

Wave on Your Mobile Device

Figure 2-12. When you run the Wave client on your iPhone, Wave removes all traces of Mobile Safari to give you a fullscreen experience.

Any communication tool worth its salt needs to be accessible on mobile devices, including Wave. Happily, even at this early stage with its stringent browser requirements, Wave offers a compact, touchscreen-friendly mobile version that mostly works in current modern mobile browsers, including the default browsers on the iPhone, iPod touch, and Android devices.

For example, when you first visit Wave in Mobile Safari on the iPhone, a warning appears telling you that your browser isn't supported. However, if you tap on the "go ahead" link, not only does Wave load, it loads fullscreen, without any of Safari's interface visible.^[12] If you add a Wave bookmark to your homescreen, every time you launch Wave it also loads fullscreen, like a standalone application.

Wave also loads in Android's built-in web browser after you tap the "go ahead" link. But be warned: when Wave tells you your browser isn't supported and you click "go ahead" anyway, there's a risk that certain waves won't open or that they will misbehave.

Wave Site-Specific Browsers

Site-specific browsers (or SSBs) ^[13] are special web browsers built to run single web applications.

Waveboard^[14] for Mac is one such SSB for Google Wave that offers Wave integration to your Mac desktop with a dedicated icon, unread wave counts on the Dock, and Growl notifications. Waveboard is currently in beta and requires Google Gears. (Because Google Gears is compatible only with Mac OS 10.5 as of this writing, 10.6 users need an unofficial Gears build.) Waveboard is also available as a dedicated Wave client for the iPhone, adding an integrated browser for opening external links inside the app.^[15]

Similarly, Waver,^[16] an SSB that runs anywhere Adobe AIR does (Windows and Mac), puts the mobile version of Wave into a separate window on your desktop.

You've created your first wave, and you know how to contribute to a wave. Now it's time to beef up your Wave contacts list and set up your Wave profile to make more collaborative magic happen. Head into Chapter 3, Manage Your Wave Contacts, for more on finding and contacting people on Wave.

References

1. ↑ Surfs up Wednesday: Google Wave update, The Official Google Blog
2. ↑ Request for invitation to Google Wave signup page, Google.com
3. ↑ Google Wave API Overview, Google.com
4. ↑ Andy Baio, Twitter.com
5. ↑ Google Wave API Overview, Google.com
6. ↑ Google Wave Help: How do I participate in a wave?, Google.com
7. ↑ Google Chrome, Google.com
8. ↑ Firefox web browser, Mozilla.com
9. ↑ Safari, Apple.com
10. ↑ Google Gears, Google.com
11. ↑ Google Chrome Frame, Google.com
12. ↑ Supported metas, Safari Dev Center: Safari HTML Reference, Apple.com
13. ↑ Site-specific browser, Wikipedia.org
14. ↑ Waveboard, GetWaveboard.com
15. ↑ Waveboard, iTunes Store
16. ↑ Waver, Adobe.com