Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Google Wave FAQ & Tips

This past weekend I started to post a quick tutorial for public wave's users on how to use Google Wave in my Wave page.

I made a mistake in my first public wave post. I added the public address to my wave's contact list before writing the article. While I just finished typing two lines then one user visited my wave, he wrote straight forward below my sentence, "hi, could you see while I'm typing...?"

Sure I could but I didn't want to chat with you, I'm writing my article and you break my concentration, don't bother me please!

The problem is, I can not delete it since it has been recorded by the system. I click the un-follow button and drag the entire wave to my trash folder.

Of course I didn't say something like that, however, this is one of negative side from real-time communication features. To avoid that, the rule is - finish first your article in your wave page then add the public address in to your wave's contact list afterwards.

It is quite interesting to see how users started to use their first Google Wave. Some users introduce themselves, hi my name is John Doe bla.. bla.., others post a discussion topic where in most case it will go out of topics and one user started a boring topic in Internet such as Why we believe in God.

Here, I would like to share a quick 'how to' around Wave. This is not intend to be read by the expert but more for us the ordinary users of Internet.

What is Google Wave?
Google Wave is an Online Tool for real-time communication and collaboration.

What is the purpose of Google Wave?
You can use Google Wave for any range of Internet activities you have been familiar with.

You can use it similar like social networks sites such as Facebook, Myspace etc, keep contact with your friends or colleagues, only for fun playing interactive online games, sharing your documents, create your Wave Blogging or use it for business activities.

Google Wave is a mini Internet inside the Internet, an open communication platform that can be growth to any direction depend on how the users will use it for their own purposes.

How to post a wave for public?
  • To post a public wave add a public@a.gwave.com address into your contact list first.
  • Click a new wave button and start type your content. Your wave first line will become a title that will appear in wave public threads.
  • Once you have finished with your content then add the "public@a.gwave.com" into your wave article. It will immediately be readable by wave readers.
  • Add tags to the article by clicking the tag's button in the bottom of your wave page. Tags will help users to find a certain topics in public wave.
Please be aware once you add your wave into the public wave, everytime you type the content it will be a realtime text for the readers and there is no delete function available yet.

How to search the public wave?
  • Type with:public in the wave search field. All public wave's headings will appear in your wave inbox. If you have a slow internet connection it is recommended to limit your search to certain topics or tags.
  • Use with:public tag:tutorials to find a public wave with tutorial topics, or if you want to find a certain keyword phrase you can use with:public "how to search the public wave". The keyword phrase should be inside the quote sign.
What is wave timeline?
Any action you - or other users - do in each wave will be recorded by the system. This allows you to navigate through the history of the wave, seeing every edit made and by who. To see the timeline, click the Playback button at the top of the respective wave.

Timeline also applied in public wave, where all readers can read through all actions in the threads except private reply section. Private replies only appear to the contacts which are included in the private reply section.

more.. later on..

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Google Wave – a new communication tool for business?

Lars Rasmussen, Google Software Engineering Manager posted in Google Official blog about the idea of Google Wave. In this article he comes up with some interesting notes:
  • Today, we are facing varies of different types of digital communication such as email, sms, chat, videos and conversations versus documents. Why we do have to live with all those things?
  • Is there any possibility to design a single communications model that can cover all those features and gradually transform what we currently have in a web today?
  • Instead of imitating the non-electronic forms, why not we are able to design a new communications model based on the ability of current networks infrastructure, computer technology, hardware and software?


Google Wave at wave.google.com has been launched to public in October this year. Currently, this site only can be used by limited users who have received the invitation from Google and registered users.

What is Google Wave and how can we take advantage of this technology in our business activities?

In simple words, Google Wave offered a new approach of the current communication tools on the Internet. Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration.

Regardless what kind of names you have been familiar with in Internet such as Emails, Chats, Forums, Groups, Blogs, Social Networks, Docs or Web Content etc., Google Wave will treat all of these terms and activities as a Wave. A Wave is a set of activity tasks among users or between users and applications.

For businesses, this new approach will open unlimited possibilities of ideas that can improve the current web based technology and its processes. There are plenty of benefits of 'Wave' model that can be applied in day-to-day business function. Below are some of the Google Wave advantages:

Google Wave is an Open Source:

Google committed that Google Wave is open source, "free" software, as a framework platform for open-source developers to create their own application.

A framework platform allows business to develop the applications that can meet their own business requirement. It can be used in various types of web based applications such as a subset of corporate website, intranet-extranet sites, social networks, online marketing, CRM etc.

Users also have the options whether to install Google Wave in their own web server or allow Google networks to host the application.

Interaction between human and non human things:

In "social networks" media such as FaceBook you may only have a human as your friend or contact. Your friends are represented by their email addresses.

Google Wave allows you to add a non human 'thing', a web services, as your contact /friend, as long as it has its own email address.

Let say you're not sure about your garage door, it might be locked or not. In this case you can add your garage door as one of your contact with the IP address as garage@yourdomain.com.

Then you can send a message such as 'door status please' to your 'door' contact as a new wave in your Google Wave dashboard.

Your garage's contact will reply back to your Wave inbox with a reply message such as 'locked' or 'you forgot to lock me, stupid!'.

Of course you can't send a message 'lock the door, please', since you need a real human to do that job.

From the above scenario, you can get the ideas where there are many possibilities of interaction processes that can be developed in the future for business purposes such as hardware maintenance, stocks, inventory, purchase order etc.

In Google Wave the non-human contact named as Robot.

GWave in Customer Service:

Currently if we have an issue with our service provider we will deal with customer's service staff, account manager or technical support. It's a quite long process dealing with different person and communication via phone calls and emails.

Google Wave can integrate those processes into an integrated interface, Google Voice, Contacts and Robots. It is a real time interaction between wave components, where all participants can follow through the information from any point of communication thread.

SalesForce CRM has started the ideas on how to integrate their existing application into Wave here in this URL: Getting in front of the wave

Finally, at this stage it is too early to predict how far Google Wave model will provide direct benefits in business process. It is still in a trial stage, quite slow and needs lot of improvements before it can be used in the enterprise level. However, at least we have the ideas that the new business process models in the next unified communication era will simplify the traditional processes, become more in-expensive and of course it is promising.

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Use GMail as your notepad

If you're a very busy person you can use gmail as your working document not only for email purposes. Instead of rely on notebook, you can treat Google phone as a handy mini notebook in your pocket.

GPhone provide gmail as one of its default feature besides other useful stuff such as youtube, contacts and calendar.

To use gmail as your temporary docs, compose a new mail, fill in your email address in the 'to' field and save it as 'draft'. Now you're ready to work anywhere as long as your GPhone battery power still available.

Enjoy.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Tips to have your own email address and Google Mail


Are you using drvk345@free_email.com as your email address?

First of all, it is not too easy for your contacts to remember your email address. The other thing is, it might not looks as a trusted email, especially if you're willing to offer your business to your contacts. Lets say you send an email to your contacts telling that you are a world wide distributor for certain products, with such kind of email address, it will looks a little bit weird. It is ok for dating service but not for business. Besides that, if you're using a free email address or your internet service provider email address, you also would have to announce to your contacts every time you want to change your email's provider. Most of us are lazy to update the contact list.

When you apply the internet connection to the internet service provider, normally you will get an email address such as your_name@optus.com.au address. It will be a good idea not to publish this email to the internet public and only use it to communicate to your provider, or keep it as your private email. By using your provider email address it means you will become their unpaid sales to promote their brand-name through the internet.

For i.e if you are using a free email from Yahoo or Google as your email address. Once you setup the free account, you already help them as the target for their Ads. This phase is enough as a win win solution, they gave you a free account and you are happy to receive their Ads. But, if you're using a Yahoo or Google email address, then it means you help them more on their brand name promotion.

I don't see the reason why here in Australia some tv media, they are not fully confidence using their own domain name instead promoting Yahoo for Channel 7 http://au.tv.yahoo.com/ or MSN for Channel 9 http://ninemsn.com.au/. Maybe ABC one day will consider to use abc.google.com.au in the future :)

This article is intend to give you the idea how to use your own domain name in your email address and use your free email account such as Google or Yahoo as your email application tool, to manage and store your emails.

So the rule is, use your own email address, never change your email address and use your name clearly.

Below are the tips on how to get your own email address:

Domain Name

Apply a domain name to a domain name provider. Domain Name is an Internet website address such as www.YourName.com. Each country has its own accredited domain name registrars managed by Domain Name Administrator, for i.e in Australia you can visit AuDA website as the Australian Domain Names Administration for domain name providers.

It will cost you less than $15 per year to get your own domain name. You can apply for 2 years contract maximum up to 10 years contract. While register a domain name, use your internet service provider email as your contact email address.

Assign your domain name to a Web Hosting Provider

A domain names provider only register your domain name, it is not a website address yet. To publish it to the internet you have to apply a web server from a web hosting company to host your domain name. It will take around two days to populate your domain name through the Internet.

The cost for web hosting will be vary from $5 - up to $15 per month even you also can use a free web hosting from the Internet. However, it is better to use a trusted and a good web hosting provider to host your domain name. The $60 price per year for web hosting is not an expensive cost since you can use it as your website besides hosted your email address.

Normally, your web hosting company provides you a control panel where you can create and manage your email accounts. You can have as many email addresses you want to create in your web server. In your web server you can provide email addresses to your staff, your family or your friends. There is one problem though, you need to maintain and manage your user's account. A web hosting company will happy if you or your users always forget to delete emails from the web server. It means you need bigger web server spaces and have to pay more.

Managing email address accounts are time consuming, especially if you are a small company or individual businesses. Fortunately, in Internet there are always a solution to make our life easier, from the following step:

Forward your email account to Google Mail

You can forward each email account in your web server to other email address. Most web hosting provide this email forwarding features. With Email forwarding option, any email sent to your email address will be forwarded to specified other email address, in this case for i.e. you can forward it to your Google Mail account. By forwarding your email address to Google Mail account, you will not store your emails in your web server and it will be stored in your Google Mail account. Google provides you with 7 Gb space, it is more than enough. Google also allow you to forward it to other email address for i.e to your internet service provider email address. So you still have the options, to open your email using your email application or web based email.

The Benefit

From the above tips, finally here are the benefits for you:
  • You always use your own email address with your own domain name to the Internet users publicly. It is a trusted identity and also can promote your business to the Internet via your own domain name.
  • You can change your internet service provider or your email provider any time you wish, but your email address will remain the same. Your contacts will never lost your email address.
  • You don't have to manage your web server email accounts individually. Your users can manage their account themselves through their own Google account. It will save your time a lot!
  • You don't need a big web server space to store your email.
  • Even if someone sent you a mis-type name behind your domain name address, such as mistype@your_domain_name.com, you still able to receive it in your Google mail account.