If you’re starting to tire of the Wave, not to worry. This will be our last post on the subject for a while.
So far we’ve looked at the basics of the application, toured through the interface, discussed what to do once you get your invite and even looked at a few good resources to read if you’re still waiting.
Today I’m sharing a list of the extensions and gadgets available for Wave that caught my attention.
The Defaults
Organize as a group.
By default, there is an Extensions Gallery wave that lists several extensions available for use when you first log in. Six in fact. They are the Wave Sudoku, Conference from Ribbit, Video Chat Experience by 6rounds, Trippy by Lonely Planet, and AccuWeather by AcuuWeather.com.
The Trippy extension could be a useful tool when planning group trips and vacations. As well, the Ribbit entry looks to have the potential to make large conference calls easier to manage. But the others seem to be either a waste of time or there are better alternatives to use eslewhere.
A potentially useful extension for teams.
Personally, these default extensions are not of much interest to me and I hope that the offerings increase sooner than later.
There are also two gadgets included here. They are the Map and Voting gadgets created by Google themselves. You can read about all these on Google’s Featured Extensions page. And they both would be useful in day to day communication — kudos to Google for making sure their own offerings were useful and relevant.
Other Available Options
Sadly, there aren’t many.
As Google is slowly unveiling the application, the extensions available are very minimal. There are a few that you can read about, but not a lot that are available for use. The Waves Samples Gallery shows what the future may hold for the application but who knows how long this may take to be a reality.
Mashable has also covered some other interesting extensions. The one that caught my attention was Twave — a robot called Twitty integrates your twitter stream into your wave.
The best example I’ve seen so far comes courtesy of the team at WithWaves. Their first offering is named AmazonBot, which allows you to shop on Amazon from within a wave. You can browse through the Amazon departments and even preview music.
Follow this link to see the music preview in action on their site.
A good example of the potential of Wave.
And Questions Remain
After a full week of having access to Wave, playing with the settings and extensions, my biggest question is this — if I should choose to make Wave my primary communication tool in the future, what will my interactions who those who do not use Wave look like?
The only mention I was able to find all week was a tweet from a member of the Wave team stating that they had designed the app to be able to be used as as email client when interacting with non-Wave users. Apart from that, no one seems to be talking much on this subject.
Since I still have one invite left to giveaway, I’d like to hear what your questions are regarding Wave. Leave a comment and let the rest of us know what you still want to know about Wave.
That’s a Wrap
Well, this ends our discussion of Wave for the week. Sadly, the coverage here is a bit of the reflection of the app itself — a lot of excitement built beforehand, with a slow fizzle to not much of anything at all. At this point, I’m sure feeling like the hype outweighed the experience. And that was reflected here.
There’s simply only so much to talk about .
Until Wave becomes more available and more people move to the platform, there’s no way to accurately gauge if it will change the way we communicate.
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The $64,000 question that I suppose one would ask, for a tool that’s supposed to be really interesting when other people actually use it, unlike all the other Google invite-only unveilings, isn’t this a slightly bizarre rollout? GMail was invite-only, but you could e-mail other people, it didn’t matter if they had a GMail account or not, it was beneficial to you.
But from what you’re saying, it appears Google Wave is basically useless unless other people use it. And that’s just disturbing, since RSS can be accessed by any application, so even my friends who upload a flat-text file and have a Python script run every few minutes to make an RSS feed, I can still use my RSS reader to read his blog. He’ll never bother with Google Wave though.
Oh, and definitely would appreciate an invite, since you mentioned. ^^
Exactly!
I was using Wave Sandbox with many people but have got the Wave preview invite and no one’s in my friends list!!
I would like to know how various multimedia files look and act in a wave. The google team outlined how photos would work, but left out video and audio from their demonstration.
So, does a video show up as a stream-able file? Or is it an attachment that you have to download before viewing? How about an audio file? If I put an mp3 or m4a into a wave, does it stream on the other side, or do the other members of the wave have to download it before hearing it?
Thanks for all the great info on Wave!
The problem here is that for this to work everyone has to give in to Google. I doubt very much that people are going to change their email addresses and habits just so they can use Wave. I see Wave becoming much like Twitter. It’s going to be used by a very select “techie” crowd. They are going to love it and question how they ever communicated before Wave. But there is going to be a vast majority that don’t get it and aren’t going to change their online routine to try it out. Should be very interesting.
Thanks for all the Wave info this past week. I really enjoyed it!
Currently Wave is not of much use if you just want to “communicate”. It’s the same as with fax: The first person who bought a fax machine must have been an idiot, if there was no one else to whom he can send a fax. However, people adopted it over time and it was one of the most important means of communication for several decades.
I think it’s the same with Google Wave. However, Google has the advantage that it can integrate existing technologies into Wave (over time) and thereby make the service more valuable to existing users. If you look at Jabber/XMPP (the protocol “underlying” Wave), there are already lots of transports into other networks, such as AIM, Email, Twitter, etc. So it’s just a matter of time until these gateways will also be integrated into Wave.
Personally my main interest in Wave is from the software engineering perspective. I’m a software developer and I’d like to write software for Wave now, because I’m 100% sure that Wave will prevail, and I want to have some cool software ready when the masses switch to Wave.
There are many questions popping into my mind before trying Google Wave out:
- Does the distraction of the constantly updating waves mean a productivity loss? Will the foreseeable benefits outweigh it? How can the users handle the information overload?
- Can blips be extracted from a wave or inserted to it (so that if a wave gets complex, it could be restructured, which is a natural operation)?
- Technically, how easy it is to refer and link to waves and blips? Do they have unique, permanent URIs?
- Is there a way to attach semantic metadata and translations to waves?
I’m looking forward to having these exciting questions answered by seeing how Google Wave works in practice!
@Dennis: Actually I think that Wave helps you against information overload as it allows you to structure the information.
Let’s take the user case where I first email someone and then afterwards discuss the contents of the email via IM (and let’s assume that I’ve previously discussed something else with the same person): In this case not only the IM conversation is completely independent of my email (so if I’m reading one of them I cannot directly locate the other one), but two topics are also mixed into the same IM conversation.
With Wave on the other hand, you first open a new Wave (with the relevant content), and then do the discussion of the topic in the same Wave. So you always have the full information at hand and do not need to search for parts of the information. Additionally, you also know that what you’re reading in the Wave is the latest information – compared to Email where there may have been some other mails updating the first one.
- Regarding the blip restructuring point: This one may actually be a security problem. Let’s assume that you respond in a blip with “Yes – I agree”, and someone moves the blip to a completely unrelated Wave. Of course, something like in the case of mail might be possible, where instead of the name it says “forwarded by…”.
- As far as I know it is possible to refer to waves and blips in the Wave protocol itself. However, I do not know if it is possible to use these features in Google’s current webinterface (as I don’t have an account yet).
Hi Chris,
We just released the eBayBot Robot and gadget for google wave. It’s similar to the Amazon Robot mentioned in your post.
The eBayBot allows users to collaborate around auctions and products on eBay.
If anybody is interested you can check it out here.
http://withwaves.com/ebay/
There you can also find some videos that show how to install the robot and gadget and a demo of the bot in action for those of you who don’t have access to google wave yet.