A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
How does it work?
From the Notifications menu, you can select the frequency of your email updates. If you are an infrequent Google Wave user we would recommend the "immediately" setting, but you can change it at any time.
When you're added to a new wave, or a wave that you are on changes, we'll send you an email with a short summary of the text and links to go straight to your updated waves. Rest assured, we know waves can change a lot, so we will only send you one notification about a changed wave until you have logged in to look at it (i.e.: if a wave changes 10 times after we send the first notification, we won't send 10 more emails). Waves you have open also won't trigger updates.
I love this! Please switch on email notifications for all of my friends!
We're still refining this feature and part of that includes getting feedback from enthusiastic users like you.
If you want to use Google Wave with your friends, family or colleagues who aren't logging in frequently, help them to turn on notifications. Then, they can get updates on their Google Wave account, even if they mainly stick to checking their email inbox.
Known issues
This is still a work in progress. For example, we're aware that:
* Sometimes the email snippet does not show all participants on the wave
* Under certain conditions you may get an update about a wave even if you were the last person to change it
* To change the notifications setting you have to go back to the menu where you turned it on. (The link at the bottom of the notification emails is not working yet.)
Without a wave, we would have had to resort to numerous back and forth e-mails, sending graphics files to each other for approval, having people go from office to office to see updates and answer questions and lots of time tracking people down by phone. Instead, we did the entire project in wave in just a fraction of the amount of time it would normally have taken. In fact, you will see a comment by Jennifer near the bottom of the wave where she says she is seriously crying at her desk. She is referring to the fact that we got through this project in just a fraction of the time it would normally have taken and without a lot of the hassles we normally have in something like this.
This week, we're launching two new features to help you manage the waves you create: making participants read-only and restoring a wave to an earlier state.
Read-Only Participants
The creator of a wave can now change other participants on the wave between full access and read-only by clicking on their picture at the top of the wave panel, and selecting the access level in the drop-down:
As the name implies, read-only participants are prevented from making any changes to the wave, including adding new participants. They can, however, view live changes to the wave, and look at the history in playback.
You can make entire groups read-only as well, including the "public" group, which includes all Google Wave users. Note that individual permissions take precedence over group permissions, so even if a group has full access, an individual can be given read-only access, and vice versa.
Restore from Playback
Anyone with full access to a wave can now restore that wave to any previous state visible in playback:
Restoring does not delete anything from the playback history, but adds the restored state to the end of the history. That way you can use the new restore function to correct mistakes you or others make in a wave (including restoring the the wrong state!).
For the Public people We've occasionally received reports from users of public waves that they found it difficult to keep their waves on topic. Read-only and restore may help in such cases: the creator of the wave can make some participants read-only, and then restore the wave to a point they liked.
Future Features These two simple features are only the beginning of a set of things on our drawing board aimed at giving users better control over waves they create. For example, we're planning to introduce a third access setting -- 'Reply-only' -- that would let users add new blips, but prevent them from editing blips they did not create. We're also re-designing the interface to let you change permissions for several participants more easily.
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