A bunch of new tips

November 18, 2009 By 1 Comment

Google posts new tips from time to time.  Here are a few recent ones:

Search for public waves in your language — Search for “with:public + terms” and you’ll get a ton of results in your language (35 available).

Color code your inbox with saved searches — This is a neat way to mark things in your inbox.  The result is similar to the “labels” found in gmail.  Create a search, save it, and then apply a color to it.  Any items in your inbox that are there because of the search will be marked with that search and colored.  See this short video below for details:

Link your waves: Find the wave you want to link in your search panel, then drag and drop that wave into your compose window.  That’s it!  Remember that people will need to be participants of both waves to be able to see the content in both.

Open multiple waves at once: Hold down ‘Ctrl” (PC) or ‘Cmd’ (Mac) and then click on another wave.

Quickly read unread blips: Use the spacebar to jump from one unread blip to the next.  This can be very useful in large waves that have many changes in them.

Any other tips? What are some of your favorite shortcuts?  Leave a comment and let us know!

Filed Under: Features, Uses, Videos

Google Wave 101

November 17, 2009 By 2 Comments

I’ve had a few people tell me they’ve gotten their Wave invite and then jumped in to check it out, but they didn’t really know what to do with it.  I’ve just put together a quick 4-1/2 minute screencast that shows some of the basics.  In this video, I’ll show you how to:

  • Add contacts so you can connect with your friends
  • Invite other users
  • Create a Wave and add a friend to it
  • Play with some of the basic extensions

It’s very simple stuff, but hopefully it’ll help you get your feet wet and start playing around.

You can watch the video here. (4:25)

If you’re still looking for an invite, keep following us on Twitter and we’ll post on there when we have more.

If you have other questions, please feel free to leave a comment on this post.

Filed Under: extensions, Features, Uses, Videos Tagged With: , , ,

Keep your inbox clean with the new follow/unfollow feature

November 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Google has added a nice little feature to Wave today — following and unfollowing.  They’re removed the old “mute” command and made it a bit more sophisticated.

The main problem was with that people would read public waves, get automatically added to them, and their inbox would quickly become overwhelmed.  This new feature should help eliminate that problem.

follow

Here’s how following works: When someone adds you directly to a wave, or if you contribute to a wave, you will automatically be following that wave. When you see a public wave that you would like to get updates on, you can chose to follow it by hitting the follow button in the wave panel toolbar. You can remove these waves from your inbox by hitting the “archive” button, but when there is an update they will pop back in. You can switch between following and unfollowing a wave as much and as often as you like.

While it’s not overly different from the old “mute” feature, the extra control and the more familiar language should make it very useful for a lot of people.  Google has plans to add more features to help you control your inbox, and may eventually allow you to follow people, groups and/or searches.

More coverage of this feature can be found at TechCrunch and Lifehacker.

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: , , , , ,
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