Get Started with 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.

If you're brand new to Google Wave, this chapter covers how to get and give an invitation to the Wave preview, set up your new Wave account, find your way around Wave, and create your first wave. You'll also find public waves to participate in, glory in your first Wave experience, learn the three ways to update or edit a wave, and set access permissions.

Get ready to put Wave through its paces.

Wave Preview Invitations

The first release of Google Wave is a limited preview that's 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 to the Wave homepage and register for an account.

As a collaboration tool, Wave can't live up to its potential until you've got people to participate in waves with you—but the invitation wall means there's a good chance that not many of your acquaintances are in Wave. Google offers two ways for uninvited users to secure an invitation to Wave: they can either sign up for an invitation with Google or receive an invitation from a friend who's already using Wave.

How to Give Someone an Invitation to the Wave Preview

Google has sent out over one million invitations to the Wave preview,^[1] and each person they invite also receives invitation "nominations" to share with their own contacts. If you're already using Wave, you can determine whether or not you've got invitations to hand out by entering the following search into the Wave search panel: title:"Invite others to Google Wave". If you've got unused invitations in this wave, you can send one to any contact by simply entering her email address into the Enter an email address text box, as seen in Figure 2-1. Then click the button labeled Add to invitation list.

Figure 2-1. Search title:"Invite others to Google Wave" to find your invitation wave and use it to invite others to Google Wave.

The invitation may not get sent out 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 your search for invitations turns up nothing in your inbox, don't lose hope. As Google gains confidence that their system can handle more invitations, you'll eventually find the invitation wave in your inbox. Similarly, Google will slowly add more invitations to your account over time, even if you've used up all of your available invitations.^[2]

How to Get an Invitation to the Wave Preview

If you don't know anyone already using Wave who can nominate you for an account (see above), you're not out of luck. You can request an invitation directly from Google at their aptly-named Request for invitation to Google Wave signup page.^[3] Slowly but surely the people who express interest in trying Wave are receiving invitations. But don't wait. Interest in Wave grows by the day, so the sooner you request an invitation, the better.

If all goes well with one of the methods above, eventually you'll receive an invitation to the Wave preview in your email inbox, as shown in Figure 2-2.

Figure 2-2. When you've been nominated for a Wave invitation, eventually you'll receive an email inviting you to the Wave preview.

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 Wave ID Is Not an Email Address (Even Though It Looks Like One)

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 at that ID.

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, as shown in Figure 2-3. From left to right, the first column includes the Navigation panel on top (like the Gmail sidebar with its 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. The third column is where you can start a new wave or open an existing wave.

Figure 2-3. 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 2-3.) 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 may seem similar to 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 2-4. The anatomy of a single wave with two wavelets and five blips, adapted from the Google Wave API Overview.^[4]

In Figure 2-4, 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 "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 in Wave

Wave uses your 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 Contacts 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 that contact in a couple of ways:

• Click the New Wave button at the top corner of the Search panel (to the left of the search box), 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 your first message and click Done. Once you do, Wave prompts you to add participants with a drop-down contacts menu, as shown in Figure 2-5. (This same menu displays any time you click the + (plus) button at the top of a wave.) Click a contact to add him or her to the wave.
  

  

  Figure 2-5. You can add new participants to a wave by clicking the + (plus) button.
• Alternately, in the Contacts panel, click a contact's icon, then click the New Wave button on their profile panel, as shown in Figure 2-6. Type your message, then click Done.
  

  

  Figure 2-6. 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 realize 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:

• Click the + (plus) button at the top 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 press Enter to add that person to the wave, or click the contact.
• Or, 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 message, you'd need to CC a new contact to pull someone else into an existing conversation, then they'd have to piece together the conversation from the bottom up. 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 in Wave, Go Public!

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 with other users who are online at the same time as you are is the best way to understand how it works. Luckily, even if you don't have anyone in your Contacts panel to wave real-time, you can still find and participate in public waves live any time of day or night.

Type the with:public search term 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. As you can see in Figure 2-7, this search returns a dense, moving sea of public waves that update in real-time before your eyes. 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 want to follow 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 2-7. 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 in 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, you'll notice something interesting: 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 2-8. 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.

Figure 2-8. 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 add to 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. More usefully, seeing cursors update live helps you avoid stepping on other participants' toes while you collaborate on a single blip.

Live, multi-user document-editing is a feature that may be familiar to programmers who've used a special breed of collaborative text editor, 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. The Draft checkbox isn't available for use yet. 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 features that aren't yet available in Wave. See Appendix B, 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. Wave also highlights the number of changed, unread blips in green, as shown in Figure 2-9.

Figure 2-9 also shows that when you open an updated wave, you can identify unread or changed blips by looking for the vertical green bar in the left margin of the blip. Click an unread blip to mark it as read. The green bar fades away and the unread count changes in your Inbox.

Figure 2-9. 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 in the left margin 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 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 your conversation will look like a familiar, linear, IM conversation.

Figure 2-10. When you first use Wave, your instinct may be to try using it as an instant messenger.

It's only natural that you'd use Wave like 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 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 whole blip; other times, you'll want to reply to something in the midst of particularly long blip; finally, if you're collaborating on the contents of a single blip, 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. 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, as shown in Figure 2-11. Click that box to reply to that individual blip. When you're done, just click the Done button.

Figure 2-11. You can reply to any blip by mousing over its bottom edge and clicking the blue box. If you reply to a blip further up in the conversation, it appears as a nested blip.

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.

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. This simple adjustment in functionality helps clarify a common source of confusion that arises in email (as discussed in the "Email's Problems" section of Chapter 1).

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, as shown in Figure 2-12.

Figure 2-12. Reply to specific pieces of text within a blip.

The official Wave documentation claims you should select the text you want to reply to and then double-click the selection,^[8] 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. Skip the whole selection bit and just double-click the last word in the section of text you want to reply to.

Edit the Existing Contents of a Blip

What separates Wave from email even more than inline replies is that anyone can edit any part of a wave, given permission. You may have started a blip, but any wave participant with full access can join in and edit any of the text you've written. (See the following section, "Wave Access Permissions," for more on giving participants read-only or edit rights to your blips.)

You can edit the text of a blip in three ways:

• Select the blip you want to edit (the currently-selected blip will have a green outline) and click on the Edit button on the toolbar, as shown in Figure 2-13. Wave will make the blip editable and you can make changes, whether or not you're the original author of the blip.

• Click the blip's timestamp drop-down menu (the small down arrow next to the timestamp in the upper-right corner of the blip) and select Edit this message, also shown in Figure 2-13.

Figure 2-13. You can edit a blip at any time by clicking on the Edit button in the toolbar, or selecting Edit this message from the timestamp drop-down menu—whether you initially wrote the blip or not.

• Alternately, you can double-click 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 double-clicking method rather than the method in the previous bullet is that when you click Edit, Wave places your cursor directly at the end of the text you double-clicked.

Unlike other methods of participating in a wave, editing a blip's existing contents 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 name of every participant who's changed that blip.

Wave Access Permissions

While Wave's collaborative editing abilities are its strong point, sometimes you'll want to prevent certain people (or everyone) from editing blips you create. As of writing, there are two access permission levels: Full access and Read only. As of writing, a third one, Reply-only, is forthcoming.^[9]

You can set other participants' access permissions on waves you create. To do so, after you add a contact to your wave, click on the contact's icon on the top of the wave. On the lower right side of the pop-up will be a drop-down with two permission level choices: Full access and Read only, as shown in Figure 2-14.

Figure 2-14. Click on a participant's icon at the top of a wave, and choose the access permission level from the drop-down menu on the lower right of the pop-up window.

Full Access

When a participant has full access permissions to a wave, he or she can change the contents of all blips and reply within or after blips. Full access is Wave's default permission setting.

Read only Access

To prevent a participant from editing blips or replying in your wave, click on the participant's icon at the top of the wave, and choose "Read only" from the drop-down on the lower right corner of the pop-up. (You can only set a participant's access permissions on waves you have created. On waves you did not create, the drop-down will be disabled.)

If you only have read only access to a wave, the Edit button on the wave's toolbar and the "Edit this message" option on any blips' timestamp drop-down menu will be disabled.

Reply-only Access (Forthcoming)

As of writing, a third level of access permissions is promised but not yet available: reply-only. Given reply-only access, participants will be able to reply to blips but not edit them.

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. ↑ A million stamps licked ... and counting, The Google Wave Blog
2. ↑ How do I invite people to try Google Wave?, Google Wave Help
3. ↑ Request for invitation to Google Wave signup page, Google.com
4. ↑ Google Wave API Overview, Google.com
5. ↑ Andy Baio, Twitter.com
6. ↑ How does Google Wave select contacts to suggest when I add a participant to a wave?, Google Wave Help
7. ↑ Google Wave API Overview, Google.com
8. ↑ Google Wave Help: How do I participate in a wave?, Google.com
9. ↑ New features: Read-only and Restore, The Google Wave Blog