Google Wave: Follow button makes search options obsolete

Initially the Google Wave team supplied mute and unmute buttons to the toolbar, but recently they swapped them for Follow and Unfollow buttons. No, they didn’t just swap names, they changed functionality as well.

Before the feature change especially public waves could fill and clutter up your Inbox quite easily. All you needed to do was open up a wave and GW would list it on top of the box on every future edit, whether great or small.

I guess the GW developers underestimated the popularity of public waves, but luckily they know better now. If you open a public wave today, it won’t be listed in any folder, unless you specificaly order this by clicking the Follow button.

The swap makes the Archive and ‘Mark as read’ options in saved searches less useful. They came in handy to get public waves pass Inbox, but from now on these waves are unfollowed by default. While it is also not very likely that you want to automatically apply archive and read options to waves that you participate in, I expect the search options to be removed from the save search box one of these days.

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Google Wave spell checker knows

Google Wave has a context sensitive spell checker which not only marks mistyped words, but also words that might be spelled correctly, but are still wrong in the context of the sentence. Being a native Dutch speaker with moderate English skills, the grammar check already has been of great help to me.

Another nice thing is that on mouse over a drop down arrow appears next to the erratic word. Instead of right clicking, you can left click the arrow and choose the correct spelling. If you choose the original spelling, the error marker disappears.

The context sensitive checker knows it’s foreign languages. Besides English it recognizes thirteen other languages. Yes, you’ve heard it right: ‘ recognizes’. GW knows when you write in any of these languages, so you don’t need to alter any settings.

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Make yourself heard: say it in lists

Many times if I search delicious.com for certain tags, I find numbered lists – sometimes ranked – in the popular division. Lists such as:

• Five Myths About Health Care in the Rest of the World
• 8 Things You Should Know About Cable Service
• 11 Most Popular Open Source Softwares Of All Time
• The 15 greatest board games of all time

I normally feel very tempted to follow links like these instead of others. I expect to encounter an author who took time and trouble to present me only the best resources in a certain category. Ergo: if you want to draw attention with something you write, mold it into a list. You will most likely attract a lot of first time visitors, but if your list is just a load of crap, there won’t be many returning visits.

Initially I started this post because I wanted to present a top 3 of extra ordinary mindmapping apps (I do that later this life). But when writing previous paragraphs I thought it would be a fun idea to do a top ten of odd lists. Just to see how many visitors that would attract to my blog. So I went on search and found lists like:

• 40 amazing female role models for web designers
• Top 10 Free Time Wasting Sites on the Net
• Top 10 Naked People on Google Earth
• 1.001 rules for my unborn son
• Top 10 strangest Lego creations

But than I noticed Dave Kristula’s Top Ten stupidest lists and realised everything I could ever think of doing has already been done by someone else. Besides that, heavy-minded as I am, I actually lack the right sense of humor to write entertaining stories. So I better stop here and start writing something that really matters, like Three best mindmapping apps.

Play Classixx Version of Lisztomania by Phoenix (as long as it’s available)

Fragmented reality

Augmented reality is a new buzz word. It’s an interesting concept, where a device such as a mobile phone adds extra content to what’s visible in the real world. Google Wave is another much hyped about innovation. It puts typical Internet tools like mail, calendar, bulletin board, forum, chat and what not in a single wapp (web application). Not through a suite, as one would expect, but through a fairly simple, three panel window. I got access three weeks ago, which I didn’t expect. When Gmail was still in beta, somebody finally invited me only a week before it went public. Obviously this tells you more about the meagre state my social network is in, then about the master of the Nets, but that’s a different story.

I see people tripping over each other to tell us how revolutionary Wave and augmented reality are and I believe them. I want to believe them. I’m a bit short of money right now, so if I get a change to stay ahead of the masses and make some bucks out of it (instead of them profiting from me) I take it with both arms. So yes, I did jump up from my chair and made a small victory dance when I received the invitation.

But there’s one thing that bothers me a little. Most of the time I find it difficult to deal with the reality of my place in time and space. Everything in the real world is a distraction from itself. While I feel comfortable focusing on just a single aspect of life, I need to divide my attention over many things: marriage, parenting, health, job, housekeeping, family and society to name a view. I can hardly digest the vast amount of data that reaches me through good old web pages and mail. My reality is already fragmented as it is, why should I want to augment it with waves?

I love everything that goes down in the world of Information and Communication Technology, so I most likely will try very hard to understand these innovations and learn how to use them without actually using them. If I’m lucky I will be ready in time do dive into the next invention.

Play Waves by Holly Miranda (as long as it’s available)

While awaiting Google’s Wave

While awaiting Google’s Wave I might as well try out connecting my Pidgin with my wordpress.com blog through XMPP (I don’t fully understand what I’m saying here). This Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol seems to be the Wave’s backbone and, according to Jason Kolb will be the next Internet revolution. Hopefully the first one that will have me near the barricades.

This post was written in Pidgin and later edited to get a proper title, SEF URL and design. Unfortunately the links where stripped off (by Pidgin I suppose). I will add them later today.

Filesharing oddity on WinXP 64 Pro

I just spent hours making my own Windows XP 64 bit PC show up in my own workgroup and access shared folders. If I had some basic knowledge off Windows networks, I would have known that I had to turn on the TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper service first. I assume that this service is turned on by default in Windows XP 32 bit, but not in the 64 version. Or has it something to do with differences between Home and Professional distributions (comment if you know the answer)? Anyway: I eventually solved it by using the Windows Networks Problem Solver.