Go Wave!

It’s been quite a while since we all started using Google Wave. Many said it’s over-hyped, many found it as a chat client, many said they don’t have anyone to wave with & many stopped logging into wave saying it’s no longer interesting. But I don’t know what’s with me! I keep finding new & interesting new stuff on Google wave. This post shows how you can embed a fully functional Google Wave into any wordpress blog! It also shows how powerful Google Wave is & amazing possibilities of it.

To embed wave into Wordpress blog, I used a plugin called “Embed Wave”. All you need to do is install this plugin & use embed shortcode in your posts or pages to embed wave. Sample wave shortcode looks like [wave id="waveID"], just placing this tag anywhere inside your blog post or page will embed that particular wave! So, let's see how can you get ID of a particular wave. Open the wave which you want to embed & you can see URL something similar to this one https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BuZyfqdMVC.3. Let's take the part after !w, which is %252BuZyfqdMVC.3. In this, %252B represents '+' symbol in HTML, so let's remove that & also remove the .3, I don't know what it represents. Remaining is uZyfqdMVC which is the wave ID I should use.

So, If I write [wave id="uZyfqdMVC"] inside my blogpost or page, that particular wave gets embedded. Embed Wave plugin allows to embed multiple waves into one blogpost. If you wish, you can make this particular wave public to enable access to anyone having wave account. Otherwise, even if you embed it outside the Google Wave, only the ones who are participants of that wave will be able to see it.

There is one more WP plugin called WP-Wave-Shortcodes which gives you more options like, to select height & width of the embed etc. For whatever reason it didn't work for me. If you find this entire process tough, you can refer to embeddy bot which makes it really simple.

Popularity: 22% [?]

We have already come across many robots & gadgets which lets you add polling to wave. I must say this one beats all of them! Poll Gadget lets you add/remove options & create a poll. Results will be showed as soon as somebody votes. Poll Gadget uses Google chart APIs to represent the data in different charts (Bar chart & Pie chart). “Log” shows complete history about which user voted for what. Once the polling is completed, admin (One who created the poll) can click on “Embed Charts” to show the results to other users.

Gadget XML: http://wave.samuirai.de/poll.xml

Popularity: 27% [?]

Nimbb gadget for Google wave allows user to record & share videos from webcam. Once it is added to wave, flash based gadget requests for the access to webcam. User can then record the video & stop when done. Video can be played back before saving, once saved video will be automatically made available to other participants of wave. The Gadget use Nimbb APIs to record & save the video. I don’t understand why gadget doesn’t provide video URL to share it outside wave also.

Gadget XML URL: http://service.nimbb.com/GoogleWave/Nimbb.xml

Popularity: 22% [?]

XO5 is a variation of game tic-tac-toe on google wave. As the name itself says, ‘X’ is for first player, ‘O’ is for second player & whoever reaches 5 in a row wins!

Game gadget URL: http://dizbits.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/xo5/xo5.xml

Popularity: 29% [?]

Most of the web pages on internet are dynamic & inconsistent. The page which you referred today, might not be available tomorrow. Or content of that page might get changed. URL Freezer robot for Google wave uses WebCite to freeze a URL for future reference. Add this robot & enter the URL in any blip with braces, like [url]. URL Freezer automatically replaces that URL with the freezed URL obtained from WebCite.

Robot ID: urlfreezer@appspot.com

Popularity: 11% [?]

Public waves are accessible by anyone who is having a Google wave account. Wave user can search for public waves by using keyword “with:public” in the search box.

Waves are private by default, only the participants can have access to the wave. To make a wave public, user has to add public@a.gwave.com as participant to that wave. But one can’t add public@a.gwave.com as participant directly since it says “public@a.gwave.com is not a Google Wave account”. So, first add this wave id to your contact list, it will show the same message again, ignore that message & hit “Enter” key to add.

Now, since public@a.gwave.com is in your contact list, you can easily add it to any wave as participant. Once it is added, your wave goes “Public”!!

Popularity: 14% [?]

If you are active on Google wave, very soon your wave inbox get cluttered. To help organize your inbox & to get rid of unwanted waves, Google has added “Unfollow” button. Just click “Unfollow” button to get rid of a wave from inbox. You can still access these waves by searching from the “Search waves”. You might be wondering how different “Unfollow” is different from “Archive”. Well, when a wave is archived, it appears back in inbox whenever there’s something new in it. User will be automatically following a wave if it is sent to you by your friend, basically a private wave. But, if you want a public wave to appear in your inbox, you have to follow it by clicking “Follow” button. To select multiple waves use “Shift” key & you can Archive, Unfollow, Spam, Mark as Read/Unread…etc

Popularity: 4% [?]

It’s quite common that we debate on products, companies & lot of other stuff over chat & email. Trendy is really helpful when you are having that kind of a conversation. Add “Trendy” to wave & type items separated by commas which you want to compare trends ex: ~~Android, iPhone. Trendy replaces this with graph fetched from Google trends. Trendy can take up to 4 comma separated values. I found some difficulty using trendy as it’s not properly taking comma separated values. For example if I give ~~Google, Apple, graph is loading only for Google excluding Apple. Hope developer fixes it & it will be more smoother.

Robot ID: trendy-robot@appspot.com

Popularity: 12% [?]

We have got 20 invites to give away!! All you need to do is comment to this blogpost!! Make sure you are giving proper email ID while commenting, because that will be used to send you invite.

We have got 20 invites, so first 20 commentators of this blogpost can grab them!

Update:

All the invites have been given away to all who commented on this post, including the 21st commentator! Keep checking Go-Wave or subscribe to feeds for next give away. Comment section of this post has been disabled to avoid spam.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Unlike other poll/vote gadgets “Pick Several” allows  user to select multiple choices & vote. Gadget updates number of votes right away when user selects the option. This gadget is useful to run “Select all that applicable” kind of voting system.

Gadget XML: http://www.randomhacks.net/gadgets/pickseveral/pickseveral.gadget.xml

Popularity: 24% [?]