Wave invites

To all of you who are asking, we aren't giving out google wave invites, I am sorry. This is just a place for us to talk about google wave and getting to know how it works.

I have been sick with the flu since Wednesday morning so please forgive the lack of posts on my behalf.

Until next time,

Gabrielle

Who is online

I have been saying for a while that I wish you could see who was online in Google Wave. I logged in today, and saw a green circle under my portrait. In the following picture which is hopefully big enough for you to see, you can see a blip between my sister, me and a robot (I will try to explain those later). On the bottom right of my picture (the only one with an actual picture) you can see a green dot. This means that I am on Google Wave at that moment. This is an excellent development by Google Wave because you never knew who was online and who was not before this.

Until next time,

Gabrielle

Sudoku gadget

I discovered that Google Wave had a sudoku gadget, which piqued my interest since I am a fairly avid sudoku fan. It had me thinking however, that sudoku tends to be something that you play by yourself, so why is it showing up in Google Wave which is a program meant to be conversations between at LEAST two people if not more. How do you play sudoku with more than one person?

I tried to include the gadget in a wave with my sister to try it out, but I soon discovered that she does not know how to play sudoku which surprised me. But from what I gather, it seems to be a speed-play game or a work-together game meaning you can either race each other to see who can fill in the most blanks in the puzzle or view it more as two people working on the same puzzle. If you are trying to race each other, you have to know that you are both online and in that specific wave at the same time to ensure fair competition. So far, I have not found a way to see who on your contacts is actually online at that time like you can in google chat.

I really wouldn't recommend this gadget unless you are teaching someone how to play sudoku, or you are just a casual player. This game is really meant to be a single-player, and I think it should be kept that way.

I am going to try to use a rating system for Google Wave. For now, I think I am going to use a rating out of 5 as it seems to be easiest.

I'll give Sudoku a rating of 1.5 for its ability to help teach someone how to play google, and for the casual player, but for anything short of that it seems to be useless.

Until next time and hopefully my dad or sister might post again,

Gabrielle

Gadgets continued

Sorry for the long delay, but lets continue on with the gadgets that I talked about in my previous post. When you first get Google Wave, there will be a message for you all about extensions that you can install. They give you a few of their recommended gadgets for you to easily install. Here is where I will try to explain them to you.

TRIPPY

First I opened up a new wave with my sister, Kira. When I opened it, it had a trip there designed by Trippy to go to New York, but I wanted to create a trip by myself, so I pressed the delete button. Now, it is asking me "Where do you want to vist?" which you can see below on the right hand side.

I would love to be able to visit my sister and see Washington D.C. Let's say that I want to go down there for a total of 5 days, visit some of the famous buildings down there, eat out at some restaurants, and maybe go to a baseball game as well during my trip. Even though my sister lives in the area, I will also assume that I am going to need a hotel to stay at.

First, I am going to try to book my hotel.

It looks as if Trippy just uses google maps to find hotels that are in the Washington D.C. area. When I zoom in on the map and click on one of the marks, it opens up a little box that tells me the name of the hotel, the address, and the website I can find the hotel at. I'm a little disappointed in that it doesn't show me any reviews or hook up with any website to ask me about hotel reservations. I guess this requires a little bit of leg work by the user to pick the hotel.

I really don't know much about Washington D.C., but I found a Marriott Courtyard so I will add that to my itinerary.

On the corner of my little box you can see "add me to your itinerary" which led me to this box. It is asking me if I want to schedule this during a specific day or unscheduled. As you can see, this gadget definitely needs some work because it would be nice to be able to say that I want to have this as my residence during my trip.

In trying to add the Nationals game to my itinerary, I ran into difficulty first finding the park on the map, and then trying to decide which icon to click to add to my itinerary. I finally picked one randomly and added it to my itinerary for day 3. As you can see below, a search for Nationals Park gave me a lot of options.

I continued to do this with different smithsonian museums and restaurants until I filled up my trip to Washington D.C.

My Thoughts

Overall, I was not very impressed with Trippy at all. Maybe the one good thing that came out of it was that my sister could help me plan the trip and suggest places for me to go. I wish that they could hook it up to a hotel website or a travel guide to help you plan your trip. You really need to use the internet a lot to look up places to go, look up reviews, look up addresses, etc, to plan this trip out.

It is a great concept, however not well thought out. Hopefully this will change before Google Wave is released for everyone!

Until next time,

Gabrielle.

Oh and if you want us to explain something, review something, or make something more clear, please let us know in a comment!

Gadgets

Part of what makes Google Wave so special is that it is open source. My understanding of technology is limited, and maybe my father can speak more about exactly how this works with Google Wave, but developers not associated with Google have access to the software's source code (found on Wikipedia) and can develop their own programs for Google Wave. Developers can also create "gadgets" for Google Wave, which can be included in a wave between two people.

So far because it is only a preview, there are a limited number of gadgets for Google Wave. There was an introductory wave which every person received that linked recommended gadgets for people to download. These included gadgets like weather, sudoku, a yes/no/maybe poll, a gadget for creating a trip, and also a map gadget.

I am going to have having a very busy next few days, but after everything settles down I am going to write another entry and review these gadgets that were made available to us.

Until next time,

Gabrielle

Working out all the kinks

Google Wave can be pretty complicated to understand at first. My father sister and I are still trying to get the hang of it, but as we start to understand it more, the more I see just how useful it can be in the future.

My dad posted earlier today about how we had our first real 3-way conversation today without all the lag and having to wait for waves to synchronize. It was pretty neat to be able to see my sister and father type at the same time and be able to see exactly what they were writing at the time they were writing it. I think it will also be great to be able to turn off this feature which they say will be able to happen later on. If you're waving with your boss, you dont want them to see some of the mistakes that you make at first with your typing. We've all been there, quickly seen our mistake, and then pressed the backspace key to fix it. Unfortunately with Google Wave now, you can see those mistakes. This is fine for talking with your father and sister in a casual chat room, but not what you want to happen in a business meeting.

In terms of editing someone else's wave, this is still where I get a bit confused. I took a screen shot of our wave so that you could understand what we are talking about. I will also introduce the UI so you can understand it more.

Basics:

As you can see, Google Wave is just another tab on my internet browser, which happens to be Google Chrome. On the left hand side, you can see the navigation tool bar, which is pretty much like most people see on their e-mail. Below that typically is where your contacts are at. I wish there was a way to see if your contact was online, but typically they are just sitting there with their name, and a little hard-to-see picture. With my screenshot, you can see that the contacts toolbar is actually up top for me next to wear it says google wave preview. Any time I want to see my contacts, I can just press the picture of the two little windows and it will pop down for me.

In the center is where all my wave conversations are at. On the left side of that little window you can see pictures. This tells you who is involved in that wave conversation. What I don't like about this is that you can only see their pictures, so if you are like my dad and sister who have not uploaded a photo yet, it has a generic picture for you.

On the right hand side is where you can see the open wave conversation. As you can see, on the left hand side of that window is who wrote that specific message in the wave. If you see multiple pictures, it means that someone edited that message. You can even reply in the middle of a message and break it up according to if you want to respond to one part of that message. You can also flat-out edit it so that the original message gets changed.

So far it looks like when you edit it, you have to highlight what you changed on your own. Sometimes it can get confusing, and I do hope that they change it to make it more obvious as to what has been changed in the message.

I hope you might be a little less confused as to what is going on with Google Wave as this blog keeps going and we ourselves start to figure out a little bit more about what is going on. I'm sure my dad and sister can help to explain what is going on better than I can as they are much better at the technical things especially my father than I am.

Until next time,

Gabrielle

Our first real Wave

We had our first real Wave conversation this morning. It was cool and a little strange at the same time. Google Wave is non-linear. Let me explain ....

I was in an office in Waltham, MA. Gabrielle was in her dorm room in Amherst, MA. And Kira was working in Vienna, VA. All of us were on at the same time and Waved in real-time.

At first, it was like a 3-way IM conversation. But, what made it different was seeing the characters being typed letter by letter. We could watch each other build sentences. We also discovered who really needed the spelling checker. (me) So far, so linear.

Then, we got into an editing frenzy. You can go back and comment on earlier parts. For example, after the conversation went off into one direction, any one of us could go back to an early part of the dialog and pick up the thread. (In Wave, do you say pick up the current?) Your mind bounces back and forth.

Then, we would highlight words and phrases that others wrote. We could cross-out things. Change grammar. Fix stuff written by others. (It was weird to see a comment from "Kira and me" rather than two comments.)

Not used to the non-linear stuff, yet. But, I imagine that it will enable a much freer flow of thought.