How To Get Well Prepared For The Website Creation

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Education      No comments

Feb
15

Planning to build a new website and not sure where to start? No sweat, we have a cool guide from 12 points that will help you to define your website goals, target audience, choose the images and create the right look and feel for your site. All you’ll need is a sheet of paper, 10 minute access to the internet, a friend and a cup of coffee or tea. Let’s get into work.

1. Answer the question why you need a website.

Starting on website creation the very first questions you should ask yourself is “Why do I need a website?” The answer “because everyone has it” is wrong. Let’s imagine you have a small bakery in a small town and people come daily right to your door to taste your cakes and candies. Do you really need a website in this case? I guess you don’t. Now let’s imagine that you have enough time, equipment and resources to deliver the pastries to the nearby villages. Now this is the case when having a website can be a pretty good idea. Here come just a few most common reasons why you may need a website:

• Additional income
• Brand recognition and audience awareness
• You have something interesting in mind you’d like to share with the online community

2. Define your target audience.

Once you’re sure you do need a site let’s think about your future website audience. If you are making yummy pastries then your audience is the whole world, but if you are a pool cleaner for example, then you need a serious think. If you are targeting a nearby village make sure that there are pools in there and if you work as Santa make sure people who live close to you celebrate Christmas as well.

3. Check your competition and double check it once again.

This one is closely connected with point two. The bigger your field of experience and expertise is, the larger is your audience but at the same time the bigger your competition is. Say you are the only person in your city cleaning pools and everyone knows you. Now let’s imagine there’s exactly the same person in the other city and everyone knows him and invites for a cup of coffee? Right, why would they ever call you even if they find your website? Well, there’ one simple trick you can make to beat the competition- offer something special and unique. Offer lover pricing, some free services, ask your clients to put some reviews for you and put all that on a paper or make a document with notes on your computer.

4. Check similar websites and put down what you like about them and what can be made better.

Now when you know your audience and your competition you can start thinking about the website itself. Do not hurry and don’t panic. Check the websites of your competitors and websites of the top companies in your area of business. Make notes about what you like and what you don’t, what’s convenient for you as a user and what is not, how are the products presented, is it easy to find the products/service you are looking for and if it is easy to order it online. Choose several websites you like most and ask your friends to test them for usability. Compare your notes and draw conclusions.

Once complete divide your notes and conclusions into the following categories:

- design likes and dislikes: color scheme, website layout and general design direction;

- functionality: what is convenient and what is not, navigation, how quickly you can get to the product page, what’s the registration/checkout process etc;

- calls to action: what buttons, phrases or banners made you interested in the product; what made you feel the product/service is what you need and where would it be appropriate to add the buy/order/call or learn more buttons on your website.

5. Act like a customer.

While you can still act like a website visitor and not like a website owner think of the keywords you would use to find a website like yours. Ask your friends to help you and put the keywords down. It’s better to think about it now while you still have enough time before website design and development starts as these keywords will further drive traffic to the website. Do not forget about geo-targeting, people in CA won’t order cakes from NY.

6. Prepare some good photos that can attract visitors and catch their attention.

Let’s make sure your future website looks professional and attractive. Most of the website design companies will ask if you have the photos to use and will be pleasantly surprised if you do. Professional photos of your delicious cakes or neat stylish hand-made jewelry can make and indelible impression on your website visitors and push them to place the order right away. Do not use stock photos if you make the products yourself, seeing thousands of them everyday online people will know this is not yours and will subliminally feel cheated and disappointed and thus not likely to place the order. If you are creating a corporate website for say an IT company using stock photography is a usual practice and you can rely on a design company to choose the appropriate images for you. Still, if you can make photos of your stuff this will give a more personal feeling, thus more trust and comfort. We all like to see people we work with, right?

7. Think of the logo and whether you need one.

Coming to the point of brand recognition you need to think of the company logo and name (if you don’t have one yet). As a rule, if you don’t need a company logo for your offline business you won’t need it online (and if you have one you are more likely to use it online as well). Think of some nice company name and make sure it’s not taken yet. When talking to designer don’t forget to mention that you don’t have a logo but would like to have the company name written in some nice font matching the website style, look and feel. This will also help you to keep the design costs down which is very important when you are just starting your online business.

8. Think what you’d like to tell to your website visitors and put that down.

Now let’s remember how you’ve been visiting the websites of your competitors. What information was useful and what was not, what you have found interesting and what was boring, what calls to action made you actually act? Think what you’d like to tell to your customers, what it is so unique in you that they can find irresistible and place the order right away, give you a call or add the website to the favorites to check back later? Do not forget about the list of the keywords you have put down. Use them in your text as this will greatly help to rank good in the search engines when your website is up and running. At this stage you can either make one big text or start dividing it into sections.

9. Think of the main menu names.

We have come to the stage when you can plan the website structure and layout. You already have the info you have put together in point 8 and now we can use it to form the menu names. Divide your draft into the sections like about us, our products and services, why choose us, how to find and contact us etc. Ask your friends if they since something else might also be of an interest to the website visitors and add it as well. Do not tend to create many separate pages for a simple website, in most cases all the important information should be located in no more than one click from the home page. If your website is complicated, have lots of info or you plan building some kind of a portal, break the related sections into the groups, define main pages and sub pages, use the experience of your competitors and your notes from point 4 ( where you made the notes about websites friendliness and usability).

10 Think of the website colors.

The website color scheme is one of most important elements to consider. Colors act differently, gray and blue are calm and confident, red is aggressive while yellow sand and brown are cozy. What impression will your website make? Is this color appropriate for your business at all? Read some small studies and find the perfect matching colors. You can also look for colors solution on a website like colorlovers where designers have gathered thousands of color schemes pleasant to the eye and which are free to use. If you have several ideas in mind and not sure which one to choose you can consult with your designer when discussing the project details or simply ask him to try several approaches for additional fee or just make some basic sketches before working on all the details.

11. Define website style.

If you are not sure what website style is, let me give you some examples: corporate, business, urban, grunge, wallpaper, clean web 2.0, minimal, retro, fashion, cartoon etc. You can actually create your own style or make a mix. Nowadays more and more designers tend to create minimal designs with the use of big fonts and obvious calls to action. They make an accent on uniqueness of one or few elements like an intro, photo on the splash page, creative navigation or cool slideshow portfolio.

12. Make sure you can deliver what you are promising and deliver it in time.

Now when you have prepared all the info a designer usually needs to create a perfect and very special website for your company, make sure you can deliver all that you are promising. You may skip this point as it’s not directly related to getting ready for website design but it is vital part of the online business. Surfers will find hundreds of websites offering same products and services one by one and even with the perfect, cool and super-friendly design you can’t stand out from the crowd if you don’t keep to your promises. Deliver it time, give the promised discounts and finally, provide a perfect service.

13. Choose a design company.

Well, here we are. You have a big batch of notes, texts and photos and now you need to find a designer. My advice is to look for young companies as they take less, have friendly customer support and create cool things. Check their portfolios, ask questions, see if you can get some kind of a discount And don’t panic, with the tremendous info you have prepared a candy is guaranteed!

Anastasia

100 Twitter Marketing Articles for Small Business

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Education      No comments

Feb
15

1. 10 Innovative Ways To Use Twitter For Business

Social networking is excellent for those who want to promote products, services and ideas directly to a target audience. Twitter marketing is a task that involves two-way audience engagement. …

2. 5 Very Bad Facebook Marketing Tactics

The article was called 5 Very Bad Twitter Marketing Habits. But equally irritating are tactics some Facebook users use to promote themselves or their music. Here are some of the most annoying ones. 1. Event invitation spam. …

3. 7 Twitter Tips For Beginners

You got all truth about twitter. Marketing your tweets to people that follow you because of some extra website gaining followers is really pointless. I do not have as many followers yet but I really see quality difference when someone …

4. Microblogging For Business | Marketing Advertising

Threadless, the T shirt company that has made social media marketing an art form usesTwitter (@threadless) to update their audience regularly in this way. Microblogs are a great way to expand your network and build your contacts. …

5. Twitter For Marketing: You Need A System To Profit

To effectively use Twitter for marketing, without spending all your time on Twitter, you need to set up a system. An effective system that builds your Twitter following, establishes you as an authority in your niche, and subtly promotes …

6. Powerful Twitter Grader Traffic Tips | web-marketing-blog

Twitter is a popular social networking website although it is still in its nascent stage. Twitter marketing is slowly gaining popularity as…

7. Tools to Maximize Your Social Marketing Efforts on Twitter

Trying to do social marketing on Twitter without the proper tools is like trying to cut down a giant redwood with a pen knife rather than with a two man chain saw.

8. Twitter Marketing: 5 Ingredients for a Perfect Recipe

Check out the 5 elements of a perfect Twitter marketing strategy on the TopRank® Online Marketing Blog.

9. Twitter For Marketing: It’s No Longer Just Mindless Tweets

When it first appeared on the social networking scene, there wasn’t much benefit in Twitterfor marketing. Twitter was dominated by mindless chatter and…

10. Why You Need to Use Twitter As a Business Marketing Strategy

Most businesses are now realizing that traditional forms of advertising such as newspapers, television, and radio are no longer effective methods of marketing a product or service…

11. The Roles of Facebook and Twitter in Social Media Marketing

Like Facebook, marketers viewed Twitter as a primary source for generating traffic. As such, most marketers reported using Twitter to send users to marketing Web pages…

12. Twitter Marketing Guide – Use Twitter as a Marketing Tool

13. Twitter Marketing: 8 Simple Steps to Follow

Twitter is one of the simple social networks and it is also free. With these easy to do steps you can create leads from twitter.

14. Twitter Marketing Tips | Twitter Freak

Twitter has come on to the social media scene in a strong way. With millions of Tweeters around the globe, this is a hard market to blank.

15. How you can Achieve Success At Twitter Marketing

It appears that many people can’t get enough of Twitter. They’re always discussing it, online and offline. Through Twitter, you can create a large network of friends, clients, associates, and customers.

16. Easy Twitter Marketing Strategies

Twitter marketing is currently possible. The site has millions of subscribers worldwide and so you can easily find prospects there. By developing relationships, you can increase your site traffic and at the same time, increase the sales …

17. Your Perfect Twitter Marketing Strategy

You need to have the right mix of elements (and ideas) in order to have the perfect Twitter Marketing strategy. If you push your products and services too much, your followers won’t stay.

18. Successful Marketing with Twitter

Twitter to success by exploding your Twitter cash and profits, by a successful marketing strategy available by being shown the Insider Secrets to Twitter marketing success, with the potential of making money with Twitter Tools...

19. Four Styles Of Marketing On Twitter

Your segmentation of Twitter marketing based on interactive communications really helps clarify the various groups. Your article forces us to think in terms of providing our readers with better content in this really new information age …

20. Why Twitter Marketing Big For Internet Marketers?

Yes you will find many free service to grow your twitter followers, remember that Time Is Money and if you completely depend on twitter to grow your business than it does not works and you will not grow just with twitter marketing…

21. Twitter Marketing Is Something You Need To Think About

You can promote your online business more efficiently with the most excellent tool available on web called as Twitter. Twitter is a social networking site which is proving to be very useful for businessmen...

22. B2B Marketing using Twitter

This entry was posted in Internet Marketing, Social Marketing and tagged Internet Marketing, Social Marketing, social media marketing, twitter, twitter marketing. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback …

23. Does Twitter Make You a Nicer Person?

Have you ever noticed how nice the Twitterverse truly is? I sat back and stared at my Twitter stream today, which is often a source of inspiration to me, and I.

24. Twitter Marketing As Simple As Chatting

Even though there are tips on how you can improve yourTwittter marketing efforts, sometimes things are best kept “business-free.”

25. When Marketing Makes Things SO Much Better

Here’s my point… Every industry and every product has a brand.  Whether you like it or not, you’re either name-brand, generic brand, or somewhere in between. And believe it or not, you do have control…

26. Top 3 Twitter Marketing Apps

Initial trails look highly promising, especially with the Google Analytics conversation tracking that allows you to calculate revenues generated from a specific tweet. I know there’s moreTwitter marketing apps out there, …

27. How You Can Be Successful At Twitter Marketing

You must know what they’re doing in order to ensure success in Twitter marketing. The second thing that you need to do is to meet more people. ‘ReTweets’ are great for making new friends. In this tool, the original message is repeated…

28. Twitter Marketing: What You Need to Know

What makes a Twitter marketing campaign successful? At the heart of the matter is the ability to successfully generate as many targeted Twitter followers as you possibly can to your content…

29. Twitter Marketing – Are You Taking The Road To Failure?

Do you have a Twitter marketing plan in place? Do you know why you are Tweeting? Do you know how you’re starting 2010, and how you’ll finish out the year?

30. Twitter Business Secrets 3 Advanced Twitter Marketing Strategies

Have you been using Twitter for business for a long time, and you want to learn some new advanced social media strategies? In this article, you’ll learn 3 little-known Twitter Marketingsecrets that the inner circle of social marketers …

31. 5 Ingredients for a Perfect Twitter Marketing Recipe

A successful Twitter marketing strategy must include a balance of different but complementary elements. Ensure the right mix with these 5 ingredients for the perfect Twitter Marketing recipe…

32. The Twitter Marketing Blog: The Twitter SEO Effect

Another way to think about your Twitter marketing is that the process of tweeting creates a constantly-changing web page that is heavy in content. Twitter pages are very indexable, and are in fact the type of website that Google really …

33. Does Your Twitter Marketing Suck?

But, does your Twitter marketing suck? For many people this is definitely the case and they’re doing nothing but sabotaging their efforts. However, I’m here to show you what not to do and hopefully, you’ll take heed…

34. Twitter Marketing 101: Get Started Today

And that is perhaps truest when it comes to creating a successful Twitter marketingcampaign. To be really successful using Twitter, you’ll have to work to establish that kind of a reputation amongst your Twitter followers...

35. 7 Ways Marketers Can Use Twitter

For more similar info, a free report called “The Twitter Report” that’s all about ETHICAL twitter marketing, and a few easy to follow step by step videos that can show you how to get …

36. The 411 on Twitter Marketing

At the heart of every successful Twitter marketing campaign is the ability to generate a large, loyal fan base. If you are successful at that, you will soon unlock the power of Twitter as a marketing tool. Once you learn the secrets of …

37. Run a Marketing Campaign on Twitter

In conclusion, the best mindset for developing a Twitter marketing campaign is to take the perspective of your potential clientele/customers…

38. Target Followers, not “Big Follow” Strategy

Why the “Big Follow” Strategy Doesn’t Work.Yes, you get the followers. The problem is that you get a bunch of followers who aren’t really interested in anything you’re saying.

39. Twitter Marketing Tips For Your Customer Service Program

Have you been considering using Twitter as part of your marketing plan? What about using it to build your visibility and market share? And could Twitter assist you in your customer service programme? …

40. Twitter Marketing Techniques That Work

Twitter marketing techniques can give a free rein to several courses of earnings. Here are six of the grand ground-breaking ways to bring into play Twitter for your business venture or any corporate dealings. …

41. Extreme Twitter Marketing Tricks and Tips 2010 Part 2

Twitter Marketing Tricks and Tips for 2010. Get the knowledge that will help your business to grow. With Extreme Twitter MarketingTricks and Tips 2010, you will be ahead of the game in this …

42. Twitter marketing and the Power of Influence

This is the most hard to handle part of Twitter marketing and the ones which control it are the ones who succeed. Get in touch with your followers and treat them with the same respect they treat you. Offer them breaking promotions and …

43. The Power of Twitter and Marketing

Take a few minutes to watch this incredible video about the value and impact of social media and marketing your business. You can’t afford to miss this train. Oh, and turn up your speakers – the music is GREAT! (At least to me…)

44. How to Tweet: A Few Tips on Using Twitter for Your Business …

The newest player on the social networking scene is Twitter. Marketing in this venue still relatively new, and for the owners of small businesses especially…

45. Facebook And Twitter: How Smart Restaurants are Using Social Media

Many more venues are looking to experiment with Twitter Marketing in 2010. While it has been a busy and somewhat convoluted playing field, one marketer noted that his Social Network guest lists have the highest rate of return (people …

46. Effective Twitter Marketing Strategies

It’s only through effective Twitter Marketing strategies that you can achieve your marketing goals at this social site. This post explains how this is done.

47. Successful Twitter Marketing Strategies For Businesses

Twitter is soon replacing traditional communication channels as a liaison between a company and its consumers. It is also a great marketing platform. In a recent survey by MarketingProfs over which of the Twitter marketing strategies …

48. How to Tweet and Retweet on Twitter

49. Twitter Marketing Done Right

I’ve frequently been asked if I can point to a good example of twitter marketing and I saw one first hand this weekend. Sunday afternoon, I happened to notice.

50. Twitter Marketing: Here Are 8 Simple Steps

Twitter is a new free social networking site. Twitter uses a technique called micro-blogging which is nothing more than a text message that is send to other users and it is known as a tweet. These tweets are posts that are shown on the …

51. Using Twitter Marketing as a Business and Market Research Tool

There are many extensions to the Twitter service, finally making it an interesting tool for businesses to make money. The Micro Broadcasting Companies meet the same difficulties as it is for private …

52. Twitter marketing steps into a new age

Brandweek MagazineTwitter marketing steps into a new ageiMedia ConnectionTwitter’s soaring popularity in 2009 essentially turned many brand marketers into California gold rush prospectors — they weren’t too …

53. How to Use Twitter Marketing for SEO

Twitter is a social networking tool that lets you build a list of contacts that you can interact with in real time, but it isn’t meant to be used like an instant messenger tool. This Twitter Marketing Tip will explain some of Twitter’s …

54. Twitter Marketing Tips For Success

Using Twitter Marketing is easy and extremely effective. Twitter can connect you with others around the world. It is possible to obtain massive list of followers when you are genuine, and have an interest in others. …

55. Small Business Guide To Twitter Marketing

These days one way to really get the word out about your small business is to have some kind of social media presence. Social networking platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn can help put a virtual ‘face’ to your company, its products, …

56. Understanding Twitter As a Wine Marketing Tool

We’ve only just begun this Twitter marketing journey, and I ain’t stoppin’ any time soon. I love to explore. Do you have a Twitter marketing success story that you’d like to share? I just know some of you do. …

57. 10 Twitter Dos and Don’ts

This Twitter Marketing Tip will tell you 10 things you do and don’t need to do on Twitter. It’s very important that you learn and follow these rules…

58. 26 Steps in Small Business Twitter Marketing

I think that the big brands have certainly been utilizing Twitter to help promote their business message. I wonder, however, if small businesses …

59. Finding Your Twitter Voice & Style

For example, if your Twitter marketing goal is to support people, it seems to me that you would want to use a CEO or Customer Care Online Voice in a Conversationalist style. Or am I making too much of this? …

60. 2010 Twitter Marketing Tools

Our simple to use program allows you to enter your advertisement into our marketing interface to be forwarded to our database. You are not limited to 140 characters by our system as you would be directly sending via Twitter. …

61. 7 Reasons Not To Tweet – Or Are They?

Have you made an idiot of yourself on Twitter yet? The chances are you will, and there is no place to hide! Check out my 7 Reasons NOT To Tweet.

62. More Twitter Marketing Insights

In this final post, I want to share a couple of more things with you that we didn’t have a chance to go over in depth in the last few chapters. Twitter.

63. Twitter Marketing : Basics Strategies and Tactics

Brazen Careerist is an online community and career center for Generation Y — young professionals who want to define their careers using the new rules for success. This article focuses on the basics of Twitter marketing and usage for college students looking to get a job.

64. Why Do I Need Twitter?

Everybody “buzzing” about it from the pundits on CNN and The Today Show to mainstream celebs such as Ellen Degeneres and Ashton Kutcher. Ok, that is the point where you are probably screaming “DUH!” at the screen. …

65. Twitter Marketing Strategies That Work

If you have questions about Twitter Marketing and wonder if it’s right for your business, please visit my company’s website, Presence Media Group. You can check out our portfolio and contact us with your company’s info and your …

66. Twitter Marketing: Here Are 8 Simple Steps

Twitter is a free social networking site. It enables its users to do micro-blogging wherein users can send and read messages known as tweets from other users. Tweets are posts which can be displayed on the author’s profile page and are …

67. Using Twitter To Promote A Variety Of Niches

“I know I have these bits and pieces that could make me money, but I don’t know how to put them together and use Twitter to help sell them – or get traffic to them. What would make sense in my situation?”

68. 137 Twitter Marketing Tips for Small Business

In case you missed it (as I did), Anita Campbell a few months ago published 137 Twitter Tips: How Small Businesses Get the Most from Twitter, based on input from the readers of Small Business Trends.

69. Marketing 101: Proactive Twitter Marketing

Many companies have started to recognize that Twitter can be a valuable (and free) marketing tool, but many of these companies are going about it the wrong way.

70. Top Twitter Marketing Strategies

Twitter can be used for various purposes. You can use it as a networking tool and also as a marketing tool. Here in this article, you will find top strategies for using twitter as a marketer. Just follow these Strategies and see the …

71. Guy Kawasaki On Entrepreneurship & Twitter Marketing

Guy Kawasaki who was part of Apple and later founded Garage Technology Ventures a venture capital firm and is well known as the author of the best seller ‘The Art of the Start’. He currently is the Founder of Alltop a news/content…

72. Twitter Marketing Earns Business Big Dollars

In the world of marketing on Twitter, many businesses have earned big bucks just using this site alone. For example, a recent case study is Dell’s outlet store who have taken in more than $2 million in two years alone...

73. What is your Twitter Marketing Strategy

Now I write Twitter Marketing strategies for companies. Twitter has exploded way beyond the imagination and many people are making a full time income on Twitter. There are a few things you must do with your twitter profile…

74. What is your Twitter Marketing Strategy?

Now I write Twitter Marketing strategies for companies. Twitter has exploded way beyond the imagination and many people are making a full time income on Twitter. There are a few things you must do with your twitter profile. …

75. Why Use Twitter for your Business?

To inspire motivation, examine the following Twitter marketing strategies and analyze how they might benefit your company and/or organization. Announce coupon codes and special deals. Do you offer coupon codes or special deals? …

76. Twitter Marketing VS. List Building

Twitter Marketing is cool, it’s hot, but is it effective? For example, list building has been a primary activity for online marketers for years, but now newbies are getting confused. How does Twitter marketing help in list building? ..

77. Twitter Marketing Tips For All

Twitter is being used by major corporations world wide. They are using it to broadcast PR news, coupons, launches and a lot more. When I heard of twitter I did not consider it at all. I didn’t like the thought to write 140 character …

78. Do Twitter Marketing Tools Really Work?

Many entrepreneurs around the word ask this question, “Do Twitter marketing tools work?” Yes it does. Using internet for marketing is an all new method targeting on the use of popular social media for publicizing business…

79. 6 Twitter Apps for Marketing Your Business

This tool will help you measure the effectiveness of your twitter marketing campaign. The marketing potential of twitter is endless. It can serve as a gold mine for online marketers. Most twitter users are potential customers who are …

80. Simple Methods to Cultivate Focused Twitter Traffic

If you’ve been studying Twitter marketing at all you have probably realized how critical it can be to have loads of followers on your Twitter account if you want to start getting some real traffic to your site. …

81. 5 Ways Restaurants & Bars Benefit From Local Twitter Marketing

If you haven’t joined the latest internet sensation, Twitter, then you’re missing out on a golden opportunity. Not only does Twitter keep you up-to-date on “What’s Happening” in the world, but it also affords an opportunity to connect …

82. The Essentials of Twitter Marketing | Pure Web Conferencing

For a Twitter marketing campaign to be truly successful, you’ll have to do two things. You’ll have to a) get as many Twitter followers as you can to join your Twitter page and 2) you’ll have to get those followers as quickly as possible …

83. 9 Ways to Get More From Twitter

If you talk about social media, invariably someone is going to say something I’m sure you’ve heard a lot: “I don’t have time to chit-chat. Time is money, and I don’t care about a bunch of nerds’ opinions anyway.”

84. 4 Ways Companies Use Twitter For Business

If you’ve studied Twitter marketing even a little, you must know how it’s critical to have lots and lots of followers on your Twitter account if you want to start getting real traffic. Of course this is only partly true. Why? …

85. Twitter Marketing: Pros and Cons

Twitter is a free social networking tool that can be used for internet marketing and expanding your business online…

86. Marketing 101: Proactive Twitter Marketing

Many companies have started to recognize that Twitter can be a valuable (and free) marketing tool, but many of these companies are going about it the wrong way. …

87. Twitter Tools for Marketing and Social Strategies

If you type “Twitter Tools” in a search query, you might be bombarded with tools that allow you to add followers to your Twitter account. A tool that helps you add random followers in large numbers might sound like a helpful tool…

88. How effective is marketing on Twitter?

Twitter Marketing. All I keep hearing about is Twitter this and Twitter that. I have a couple of niche websites that I make money from affiliate products on as well as two blogs, and I have not set up a Twitter account yet. …

89. 5 Steps to Twitter Success

With the above advice read, continue to read onwards and learn something new about twitter marketing and about increasing your number of twitter followers without getting your account suspended by Twitter. So what is Twitter? …

90. Twitter Marketing 101 – Beginner

Recently I have come across a lot of people asking questions about Twitter, how to use Twitter, what is Twitter…etc. In response to this I had decided to create a 3-part series .

91. 3 Easy Ways To Use Twitter For Business Marketing

The survey gave positive results on using twitter marketing tools and showed rise in profits. You may even like to read 7 easy tips to maximize your online marketing with Twitter. …

92. Top 10 Twitter Apps for Business

But how many applications are there which actually support Twitter Marketing? There are more than hundreds of twitter applications claiming to be the best apps, to track and manage your business in Twitter. But one application cannot …

93. How to perfect your Twitter marketing strategy

That’s why it’s important to first, properly define what ‘Twitter marketing’ really is. It’s not traditional marketing, in fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s about building long-term connections with users, where you engage and share …

94. Twitter Marketing Secrets for Business – Exposed

Twitter marketing secrets include being active and building a large group of followers that are interested in what you are interested in. People join Twitter for different reasons, perhaps you start a conversation pertaining to your …

95. 10 Twitter Marketing Tips

I’ve had a lot of requests to share some tips on how to effectively post to Twitter. Read below to gain more followers and grab more attention on Twitter. Don’t post too much, 2-3 times/day is perfect. Post to Twitter during peak hours. …

96. Only 9% of SMBs Use Twitter for Marketing

The same phenomenon is true for plans to use pages on social sites. While 44% of businesses that are three years old or younger say they plan to market this way, only 22% of those…

97. An Experiment in Twitter Marketing

The essence of Twitter marketing is to get a sizable number of people to follow you, then tweet about products they might be interested in. Tweet too much and you’ll run many of them off. Tweet too little and you’ll not be using the …

98. Top 10 Ways to Use Twitter for Marketing

Twitter is a micro-blogging site that asks you a basic question, “What are you doing?” It allows anyone with an account to write up to 140 characters in a text field as a means to update, comment, …

99. How to Use Twitter: Twitter Marketing

That’s using Twitter marketing at its best. However, that is just one simple way in which Twitter can be used to promote your products, and there are also better ways of promoting your websites and products that blatantly mentioning …

100. Twitter Marketing: It’s More Like E-mail Than You Think

Twitter delivered incredible news with its $100 million funding round, but many are wondering how it can justify this valuation, considering that many marketers who use it aren’t paying anything to the company.

Master Wave’s Interface

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Education      No comments

Feb
15

Get to Know Wave’s Keyboard Shortcuts

The fastest way to use any software is straight from the keyboard, eliminating as many time-wasting reaches for the mouse as possible. Like Gmail and Google Reader, Wave comes with a host of keyboard shortcuts for navigating and editing waves as well as controlling in-wave image slide shows.

Navigation Shortcuts

Move around in a wave and scroll any panel using the following keyboard shortcuts. Mac users: substitute Cmd for the Ctrl key.

Wave Editing Shortcuts

Edit and reply to blips with these keyboard shortcuts. Mac users: substitute Cmd for the Ctrl key.

Image Slide Show Navigation Shortcuts

When you’re viewing a wave that contains multiple images, from the Images menu at the bottom of the wave, select View as slide show. (Sadly there’s no keyboard shortcut to launch a slide show—yet.)

Once you’re in the slide show, navigate the photos using these keyboard shortcuts.

Start Small with the Most Useful Shortcuts

A compiled list of keyboard shortcuts like the ones in the previous sections can be overwhelming to the point of confusion. As with learning keyboard shortcuts for any program, start small with the ones that perform the most common actions and are easy to remember, such as Enter to reply to a selected blip, and Shift+Enter to finish editing your current blip. Ctrl+I, Ctrl+U, and Ctrl+B (to italicize, bold, and underline text) all work the same way they do in your word processor. Ctrl+E is easy to remember because it lets you Edit a selected wave.

Once you’ve got the basic, easy-to-remember shortcuts down, move onto a few more and repeat.

Wave Interface Conventions

Not only is Wave audacious in its attempt to reinvent email, it also takes some bold bets with new interface controls and visual cues that are unconventional and therefore unintuitive to new users. In this section, you’ll learn how to recognize the ways Wave denotes things such as blip states, wave status, tags, and folders. Then, you’ll notice the Wave buttons and menus that are tucked away in less-than-obvious places. Here are a few visual cues and interface conventions worth pointing out as you get more comfortable in Wave.

The Non-Standard Wave Scrollbar

The scrollbar on the right side of Wave’s panels works a bit differently than the scrollbar in your web browser. Like most scrollbars, you can drag it up and down to scroll, or click its up and down arrows to move it. Unlike most scrollbars, the Wave scrollbar’s height doesn’t change. It’s always the same, small size, which puts its up and down arrows in close proximity to one another, as shown in Figure 6-1. Google’s intention is to benefit people accessing Wave on mobile devices or netbooks with a limited mousing area, but it has thrown off some preview users. Google explains “the deal” with the scrollbar in Wave’s Help section:

You might find that the scrollbar in Google Wave behaves a little differently from scrollbars in other Google products. To use it, you can drag the bar or you can use the arrows on either end of it—clicking the arrows without moving your mouse allows you to very quickly scroll up and down the page.

Even at this early stage, at least one developer has created a Google Chrome extension that reverts Wave’s custom scrollbars to Chrome’s native scrollbars.

Green Bars, Outlines, and Dots

Green is a very important color in Wave—it indicates activity, online status, unread, and selected blips. The green dot on a contact icon means that person is online. When you select a blip, it gets a dark green border around it (and you can perform actions on it with keyboard shortcuts). A lighter green vertical line in a blip’s left margin means it’s unread. (Press the spacebar or click to select the next unread blip in a wave, and watch its green vertical line fade.) A flashing green bar at the top of your Wave client alerts you to an incoming ping, or a change to a minimized wave. The number of unread blips in a wave are highlighted in green when that wave is listed in the Search panel.

The Wave Timestamp Drop-down Menu

In the upper-right corner of every blip, Wave displays the date or time of that blip with a small down arrow next to it. This is the timestamp drop-down menu. Click the arrow to reveal all the things you can (and can’t yet) do with a wave, from Edit this message, Reply to this message, Private reply, Hide all replies (disabled as of writing), Copy to new wave, and Delete. The Delete item is disabled for the parent wave—that is, the first blip in the wave. Every other blip can be deleted using this item.

The disabled Hide all replies item suggests that toggling every inline blip to expanded and collapsed view in one shot will be available at some point. Right now you can click the +/- (plus/minus) speech bubble at the top of any inline blip to hide or show it.

The … (Ellipses) Toolbar Button

Wave’s toolbars are packed with buttons that take up some width, and with three panels across, smaller screens and narrow windows can cut buttons off. That’s when Wave collapses the displaced buttons into a drop-down menu you can access from the … (ellipses) button, on the far right of the toolbar, as shown in Figure 6-2.

Similarly, Wave collapses a long list of wave participants into an expandable + (plus) button with a label that reads something like “1 more,” as shown in Figure 6-2. To see the full list of participants on the wave, click the small + (plus) sign to expand it.

Panel Manipulation Buttons and the “Window Shade” Pulldown

Wave provides panel manipulation buttons in the upper right corner of an open wave’s blue top bar, as shown in Figure 6-2. From left to right: the Minimize button shrinks a wave and docks it at the top of your Wave client, next to the Google Wave logo. The Maximize button minimizes all the panels except the open wave, filling the entire screen with it. The Close button (which looks like an X) closes the wave.

The Navigation, Contacts, and Search panels have only the Minimize button available—not Maximize or Close. When you minimize one of those panels, they dock at the top of your Wave client, in the space next to the Google Wave logo.

When a minimized panel or wave is docked at the top of the screen, a small down arrow gives you a “window shade” pull-down view that slides down over whatever appears in the main area of the screen. Click it to access what’s in that list without rearranging your current workspace. In Figure 6-3, the Search panel is minimized to give the open wave more room for viewing and editing. But when you click the down arrow on the docked Search panel, it pulls down over the wave’s contents.

You can also expand and contract the width of any Wave panel. Hover your cursor along the edge of any panel, and your pointer changes to indicate that you can click and pull that panel wider or narrower. This same technique works between stacked panels, like Navigation and Contacts: you can make Contacts taller while making Navigation shorter, by clicking and dragging the Contacts panel’s top edge.

Customize the Wave Interface

Now that you know how to minimize Wave panels, if you prefer a certain Wave layout, you can bookmark a Wave URL that restores that layout automatically when you visit Wave. You can also customize the order, size, and layout of the Wave client’s links and panels. Finally, you can open multiple waves at once to multi-task on a big screen.

Bookmark Your Preferred Wave Layout

Netbook owners or those who keep Wave open in a small window appreciate the ability to minimize unneeded Wave panels and maximize the reading or writing area on the wave they’re currently working on. To load Wave with certain modules minimized by default, you can use a Wave URL that contains the #minimized parameter. For example,

https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact

launches Wave with the Navigation and Contacts panels minimized. The

https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact,minimized:search

URL minimizes the Navigation, Contacts, and Search panels, as shown in Figure 6-5.

While you’re looking at Wave URLs, the observant will notice that every individual wave has an ID that appears in your browser’s address bar when you click the wave. This means you can bookmark or IM a link to a wave to anyone who can see it. (That is, you can share a link to a public wave to anyone with a Wave account; but sending a wave’s link to someone not participating in it generates a message saying they don’t have access to it.)

Reorder and Color Navigation Panel Links

From the Inbox down to the Trash, every link in Wave’s Navigation panel is configurable. You can assign it a custom color or move it up or down the list. The default links are Inbox, All, By Me, Requests, Spam, Settings, and Trash. Each is a system-generated link to a specific search, for example, Inbox runs an in:inbox search, By Me runs a by:me search, and so on. (Only the All link doesn’t display search results for waves: it shows you every wave you have access to, unfiltered.)

To rearrange the links, or to assign an individual link a custom color, click the link to select it (it turns green), then click the down arrow that appears on the right. A drop-down menu appears that lets you move the link up or down the list, or set a color, as shown in Figure 6-4.

Open Multiple Waves

To open multiple waves, Ctrl+Click the waves you want in the Search panel. Mac users, use Cmd+Click for the same effect. If the Search and/or Navigation and Contacts panels are open, Wave stacks the clicked waves on top of one another in the right column.

However, if the other panels are minimized as shown in Figure 6-5, Wave maximizes the first wave you open across both columns. Then, when you Ctrl+Click or Cmd+Click to open more waves, Wave pushes the first wave you opened into the right column, and stacks the rest on the left as shown.

What Does THAT Do?

The preview release of Wave is still in an unfinished state, so a few items in its interface act as placeholders for functionality that’s either on its way or not needed yet.

Navigation Panel: Requests

The Requests link on the Navigation Panel will list “Waves from users not in your contact list.” Right now, waves from everyone appear in your Inbox. But once Requests is working, presumably waves from people you haven’t whitelisted by putting them in your Contacts won’t go in your Inbox, they’ll go in Requests. Perhaps this is one way that Wave will head off potential problems with Wave spam.

Navigation Panel: Settings

The Settings link on the Navigation panel lists system settings waves. Right now one of those waves is “Under Construction,” but another is available and working.

Navigation Panel: Spam

One of the big problems with email that Wave wants to solve—or avoid as much as possible—is spam. Still, Wave includes a Spam! button on the Search panel and wave toolbar that lets you mark waves as spam. When you do, that wave moves from your Inbox to the in:spam search results listing that you can see when you click the Spam link in the Navigation panel.

http://completewaveguide.com

Dive Deeper into Wave

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Education      No comments

Feb
12

Format Your Waves

Wave offers light, word processor-like document formatting such as font faces, colors, headers, and bullet points to make your waves more readable and professional. When you’re composing or editing a wave, select the text you want to format and use the edit toolbar buttons shown in Figure 5-1. Keep in mind that toolbar buttons can get cut off if your wave is in a narrow area. If that happens, click the … (ellipses) button to expand the rest of the buttons into a drop-down menu.

Figure 5-1 shows a wave’s edit toolbar, and examples of Wave’s text formatting abilities. From left to right, a wave’s edit toolbar buttons let you:

• Bold, italicize, underline, and strike through text
• Select one of 14 font families (from Arial to Verdana)
• Assign a text color or a highlight (behind-the-text) color
• Choose one of four heading levels (of various sizes) or the default text size
• Create a bulleted list
• Indent or outdent paragraphs, and align text left, right, or center

The rest of the edit toolbar’s buttons, from the Link button on, insert various types of interactive content to your wave.

Insert Links into Waves

To add a link to a web page in your blip, select the text you want to link.

Not only can you link to external web sites in a wave, you can also link to other waves, wiki-style. While technically you can enter a Wave’s ID into the URL or Wave ID field shown in Figure 5-2, extracting a Wave ID is not an intuitive process. There’s a much easier way: first, while you’re editing your wave, search for the wave you want to link to in the Search panel. Then, drag and drop it into the wave that you’re editing to add the link. Remember that participants in your wave can open the linked wave only if they’re participants in it as well. When others click the link to the wave, it opens in the current wave panel.

Add Links, Images, and YouTube Clips Directly from Google Search Results

Another way to add links and other web content to waves is via a Google search panel built into Wave. Click the blue G+ button on a wave’s toolbar. From the pop-up, you can search the web for regular pages, images, and video clips. Click the tab to specify the type of content you want, enter your search terms, and press Enter. The results appear in the panel, each with an Add to wave link next to them. Click Add to wave for the desired results to insert them into your wave.

Web page links show up as plain links. Images appear as thumbnails in your wave. Video results can appear as either a link to the video, or, with an extra click, an embedded video player.

To include a video player in your wave, while you’re editing it, click the G+ button, then click the Video tab and search for “Serenity trailer.” You’ll get several results for the film trailer on YouTube. Click Add to Wave on the video of your choice. Initially it appears as a link with a small lightbulb icon next to it. Click the lightbulb and select Embed video from the drop-down menu to place the full YouTube player inside the wave, as shown in Figure 5-3.

This embedded video player is the first example we’ve seen of a Wave gadget: an interactive bit of web content in-wave.

Remove an embedded video player from your wave the way you do any gadget: in edit mode, hover over the player to display its drop-down menu in the upper-right corner, and then select Delete.

Attach Files to Your Waves

Like email, you can attach files to your waves, including images. There are two ways to add a file or image to a wave:

• If your browser has the Google Gears plug-in installed, you can drag and drop files from your computer directly into your wave. (Gears comes with Google Chrome for Windows, and it’s freely available to install for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari for Mac.)
• Or, click the paper clip icon on your wave’s toolbar, and then select the file you want to upload using the Open Files dialog box.

Except for images, most file types appear in the wave as an attachment, represented by a large icon. Figure 5-4 shows what a spreadsheet, Microsoft Word (.doc) file, a PDF, and a regular image look like as file attachments in wave.

By default, images appear as framed thumbnails when you upload them to a wave. To expand an image to its full size and remove the frame, while you’re in edit mode, hover over the image thumbnail. A small gray arrow pointing right will appear on the top right corner of the image. Click it to display the photo in-wave at full size, as shown in Figure 5-5.

Whether it’s an image or another kind of file, every file type has a caption or descriptive text included with it. By default, it’s the name of the file without the extension. Anyone participating in the wave can edit that caption, but it does not change the file name. If you click a file to download it, the downloaded file name will be the original name the file had when it was uploaded, not the edited caption.

Google limits file attachments to 20MB in size. Additionally, uploaded photos may lose quality. According to Google Wave’s help section:

All photos you upload will be downsampled—downsampling is the process of making a digital image smaller by removing pixels. Waves containing large files tend to load more slowly, so we’ve implemented this process in an effort to keep Google Wave nice and speedy.

This means that Wave isn’t suited for exchanging high-resolution photos or hosting large files. However, Wave positions itself as a photo-sharing tool for viewing web-quality photos online. It offers the benefit of collaborative photo captions and a sleek slide show for viewing photo collections.

Share Photo Collections in Wave

One big advantages of sharing photos with others in Wave is the ability to collaborate on photo captions. Another is the ability for anyone to add photos to a single wave. Rather than several people uploading separate albums of photos to different services after an event, everyone in the group can add images to a single wave. Like edits to regular wave text, caption updates and photo uploads happen real-time, and you can watch wave participants make them live.

Once photo captions are set, you can view a set of photos in-wave as a slide show.

Play a Photo Slide Show in Wave

When you add photos to a wave, their thumbnails appear in-wave, much like the thumbnail view in Mac’s Finder or Windows Explorer. When you’re done editing the wave, you can click an image to view it at its full size. Wave’s background color goes black, and the full-sized image appears mid-screen. Click the white X in the upper-right corner to close the image.

If you have multiple images in a wave, an Images button appears next to the Files button at the bottom of that wave. Click the Images button and select View as slide show to easily flip through the photos at their full sizes, as shown in Figure 5-6.

In slide show mode, image thumbnails appear at the bottom of the screen. You can click the Play button on the left to move through the images automatically. Alternately, you can click a thumbnail to see it full size, or use your arrow keys to move forward or back through the slide show. In slide show mode, you cannot see wave text or edit photo captions. To exit the slide show, click the white X in the upper-right corner of the slide show.

A slide show isn’t the only kind of rich, custom content you can add to your wave.

Add Built-in Gadgets to Your Waves

A Wave gadget is a custom interactive control you can add to your waves. Anyone can create gadgets that do a variety of things, and you can install the gadgets you want to use.

The Maps Gadget: Watch Your Collaborators Zoom and Pan Real-time

The lead engineers who built Google Wave are the same engineers who built Google Maps—so it’s no surprise that Wave has an excellent Google Maps gadget that puts an interactive map in your wave. On this embedded map you can pan and zoom, add points to locations, draw lines from one location to another, and fill polygons to highlight areas on the map. In edit mode, as you zoom, pan, draw, and switch between Map, Satellite, and Hybrid mode, if your wave’s participants are online and have your map wave open, they’ll see those changes as you make them live.

To add a map to a wave, while you’re editing the wave, click the Maps gadget button (the red pinpoint) on the toolbar. A map of your location’s general area appears in-wave. To find a specific address or location, search Google Maps by using the search box at the bottom of the Maps gadget. Click a result, and then add that pinpoint to your map by clicking the Create copy on map button, as shown in Figure 5-7.

You can also add location markers to the map by hand. In edit mode, zoom and pan to the location you want to point out, and click to add a marker there. Set the title and description in the pop-up box. Your map can include as many location markers as you want.

The Maps gadget also lets you add lines and filled polygons to your map. Click the Line and Polygon buttons to the right of the search box at the bottom of the Maps gadget while you’re in edit mode. Then click the map to start drawing. The Hand button switches you back into pan and zoom mode.

When you’re finished adding information to your map, zoom and pan to the area you want your collaborators to see when they open the wave, and select Map, Satellite, or Hybrid mode. Then click the Done button (or press Shift+Enter) to save your changes. This is the state that the wave’s participants will see the map in. While they’re viewing the map, they can zoom and pan to see other parts of the map and you will not see that activity. (A Return to shared view button lets you or the wave’s other participants snap back to the saved, shared state of the map.) If a participant switches into wave edit mode and changes the state of the map, draws on it, or adds markers, the rest of the participants can see that activity real-time.

To delete the Maps gadget, make sure you’re in edit mode, and then hover your pointer over the gadget. From the drop-down menu that appears in the gadget’s upper-right corner, select Delete.

The Yes/No/Maybe Gadget

The Yes/No/Maybe gadget helps you survey a group and tally responses to a simple question, such as “Will you make it to the party?” To add the Yes/No/Maybe gadget to your wave, click its button on the toolbar. (It appears to the left of the Maps gadget button, and its icon contains three small boxes colored green, red, and yellow.) Above the gadget, type your question. When you’re done editing the wave, add your participants to it.

To respond to the question, you and your participants click either Yes, No, or Maybe at the top of the gadget. When you do, your user icon appears in the appropriate column, and the gadget automatically tallies the total responses for each, as shown in Figure 5-8. To add a note to your response, click the Set my status link. That text appears next to your name in the response. You can change your response by clicking a different answer.

Spell Check Your Waves

Wave includes an automatic spell check feature that overrides any spell checker available in your web browser. As you type in Wave, misspelled words appear with a red underline. To correct the spelling, hover over the underlined word and click the drop-down menu that appears. Select the corrected spelling in the list, as shown in Figure 5-9.

If the word is spelled just how you intended, you can ignore the red underline. Alternately, select the correct spelling from the bottom of the suggestion drop-down menu.

Wave’s interface is available in U.S. English only. However, the spell checker understands and offers correction suggestions in more languages than just U.S. English, including Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Copy Waves

One of the main advantages of using Wave over email is that Wave doesn’t create multiple copies of a message as a byproduct of its usage—everyone included in the conversation updates it in a single place. However, there may be cases where you do want to make copies of waves, to share with different groups of people. It’s easy to do just that.

To copy a wave, click any blip’s timestamp drop-down menu and select Copy to new wave. Only the contents of the blip you copied get transferred into the new wave; none of its replies or past revisions are included.

Further, if you have read only access to a wave you’d like to use and edit for your own purposes—like a wave template—use the Copy to new wave feature to do so. See Chapter 10’s “Create Wave Templates for Reuse” section for more.

Play Back Wave Changes Over Time

One of Wave’s most powerful features is its ability to replay the entire history of a wave’s changes from creation to its current state. Every time you click the Done button (or press Shift+Enter) to complete an update or reply to a wave, Wave saves a snapshot of the document state. That version of the wave appears as one frame in its playback.

To play back a wave, open it in view mode, and then click its Playback button. A slider appears at the top of the wave, with rewind, back, forward, and fast-forward buttons on its left. Just beneath the slider, a yellow bar tells you when the wave was created, and how many revisions there are (as well as which one you’re looking at). For example, if you click the Playback button in a wave that you created on October 1st that has 33 revisions, the yellow bar reads, “You started the wave on Oct 1″ on the left, and “1 of 33″ on the right, because you’re viewing the first of 33 revisions.

To navigate between versions in playback mode, use the buttons on the left of the slider or the slider itself. Move one revision forward or back using the middle two buttons, and fast-forward or rewind to the beginning or end of a wave’s history with the outer buttons. As you move through its versions, changes to the wave from the previous version are highlighted in yellow and red text, as shown in Figure 5-10.

To restore a wave to a past version of itself, use the slider to navigate to the desired revision, and click on the Restore button.

Playback is an advanced feature for power users—it is familiar to software developers who use version control systems—but there are two everyday use cases for it.

Playback Use Case: Conversational Catch-up

Playback’s main purpose is to help Johnny-come-latelies catch up on what they missed when they’ve been added to a wave after it’s progressed through multiple changes. For example, if three co-workers are collaborating on a wave, and then add a fourth person to it, that last person is coming in on a fully developed conversation or document. To catch up with what happened in sequence, Wave’s playback functions as an instant replay. The fourth person can go back to what the wave looked like when it started, and watch what changes and contributions got added to it over time to see the flow of the conversation as it happened.

Playback Use Case: Clean Up Wave Vandalism

The ability to restore a wave to a previous version means you can easily undo unwanted changes, like vandalism on a public or group wave. If a participant has made unwanted edits to a wave, use playback and its Restore button to roll the wave back. Then, if you’re the wave owner and you want to prevent that person from editing the wave again, change his or her wave access to “Read only,” as described in Chapter 2’s “Wave Access Permissions” section.

Make a Wave Public

Instead of adding participants to your wave one by one, you can make a wave accessible to everyone on your Wave provider’s server by making it public. To make a wave public, there’s no one-click button; instead, there’s a trick.

Once the Easy Public bot is in your contacts, to make any wave public, add it as a participant. You’ll notice that Easy Public adds a special public group as a participant on the wave. This means your wave will now appear in search results for with:public.

Be prepared: Public waves can accumulate a large number of blips (into the hundreds), and as a result, become unusable. When you try to open a very active wave with more than a hundred blips, Wave is more likely to throw an error message. If you do get the wave open, playback isn’t likely to work correctly, especially if participants have added bots and gadgets, which can slow things down. People searching for public waves, especially at this early point in Wave’s roll-out, often haven’t been in Wave long enough to know what’s good Wave etiquette and what’s not, and things turn into a free-for-all. If you want your public wave to stay useful and intact for long, you’ll have to look after it, garden off-topic blips, delete slow or broken gadgets, and remove unwanted bots.

Send a Reply Only Certain People Can See

A group of friends are going to a movie that you’re not interested in, and you want to ask one friend in the group if she wants to do something else with you—without letting the rest of the group see your conversation. In Wave, you can send a reply within a large wave that only certain people can see.

To send a private reply, click a blip’s timestamp drop-down menu and select Private reply, as shown in Figure 5-11. A new, inline blip with an additional blue heading that contains its participants appears inline. Type your private message, and then add the people you want to include in the usual way. If someone is a participant in the parent wave but not the private reply, he or she cannot see the reply.

Another less obvious use of the private reply is annotating a wave for your own purposes, essentially leaving a “note to self” that you don’t want to share with others.

Publish a Wave on Your Web Site

Even at this early stage in its development, you’re not limited to only accessing your waves at wave.google.com. Wave offers the ability to embed waves on any web page where wavers can edit and interact with its contents, and all those changes appear in the rest of the participants’ Wave Inbox.

The process of publishing a wave onto your web page or blog is similar to how you embed a YouTube video onto any web page: you copy and paste a bit of HTML and JavaScript from wave into your page.

As of writing, only people logged into Wave can see waves embedded on other web sites. However, the Wave team has promised anonymous access to public, embedded waves, and when that happens, we’ll be seeing many more waves outside of our inbox.

http://completewaveguide.com

How to Do Everything in Google Buzz

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Education      No comments

Feb
11

Google’s new social media service Google Buzz will show up in your Gmail account this week. Here’s how to customize and use Buzz–or opt out of its inbox-cluttering updates completely.

Add Your Sites to Buzz

Once Buzz becomes available in your Gmail account, click on the Buzz link below the Inbox on Gmail’s sidebar to check it out. You’ll see a “Welcome to Buzz” message with a list of all the people Buzz has you automatically following (based on who you email the most).

Above the Buzz posting box, next to your name, click the “# connected sites” link to see and configure which of your social media streams get piped into Buzz, and add more. By default your menu of potential connected sites includes your Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader activity, Google chat status, Flickr photos, Blogspot blog, and Twitter feed.

However, some folks are seeing even more options, including Tumblr and FriendFeed. If those are in your Google Profile when you set up Buzz, you’ll see them in your list of connected sites. (Hint: when you add them to your GProfile, tick the “This is a profile page about me” checkbox.) For the more technically-minded, Google has published instructions on how to connect external sites to Google Buzz.

Post Buzz Only Certain People Can See

You can use Buzz like you would Google Reader–to just keep up with your friends’ social network streams from around the web. But you can also post status updates via Buzz, and limit who can see those updates. From the Buzz posting text area (which looks a whole lot like Twitter’s), add your text, links, photos, or videos, and from the drop-down choose Private to limit access to that post. Check off the Contacts groups who are allowed to see the update.

Get a Permalink to Specific Buzz

Every Buzz post and its ensuing comment thread is a web page in and of itself. To get a link to that page to IM, email, or link from another web page, click on the down-arrow to the right of a Buzz post and select “Link to this buzz.” Here’s a Buzz post I published this morning.

Send Buzz via @ Replies

If email is just too old-fashioned for you, send someone a Buzz update by using Twitter-style @ replies. Start a new Buzz post with the @ sign, and an auto-complete drop-down of your Contacts will appear. Choose the recipient, and that Buzz update will appear in your contact’s inbox (assuming he or she has Buzz enabled).

Post Buzz via Email

You can also post a Buzz update via email. From your Buzz-enabled Gmail account, send a message to buzz@gmail.com to post to Buzz. You can send image attachments (like via your cameraphone) to Buzz this way as well.

Silence Chatty Buzz Posts

With Buzz turned on in your Gmail account, comments on all the buzz you post or comment on automatically shows up in your Gmail inbox as new mail in an email conversation. If a particular thread gets too chatty and annoying, use Gmail’s Mute feature to silence it. From the “More Actions” menu in Gmail, choose “Mute”; if you have keyboard shortcuts enabled, you can tap the “M” key to mute an individual thread. You can mute a post from within Buzz, too: from the Comment drop-down, choose “Mute this post.”

Buzzkill: Turn off Buzz Completely

If you don’t want to get Buzz updates in your inbox or have access to the Buzz link in the Gmail sidebar, there’s a kill switch. At the bottom of your Gmail account, next to the “turn on/off chat” link, there is a “turn off buzz” link. Click it to opt out of Buzz updates and hide the Buzz link permanently.

If you want to be able to browse Buzz, but not get updates in your inbox, create a Gmail filter that makes Buzz updates skip the inbox automatically. In Gmail, click on the “Create a filter” link, and in the “Has the words:” field enter label:buzz. Click Next Step (and ignore Gmail’s warning about filtering labels), then choose “Skip the inbox” as the filter action, and save.

Buzz Mobile

Finally, you can ditch Foursquare or Gowalla on your mobile phone and go totally Google by visiting buzz.google.com on your iPhone or Android device. From the location-aware Web app, you can post updates that include where you are, and see buzz posted from nearby locations, too.

In addition to iPhone and Android users, Windows Mobile and Nokia S60 folks can get Buzz on Google Maps; visit m.google.com/maps on your mobile phone to enable the Buzz Maps layer.

Gina Trapani

How to Use a Blog as Your Company Website

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Business      No comments

Feb
10

No matter what your company does or sells, it needs a website — at most, a place where you can engage your community of customers and clients; and at least, a simple contact page where people can find you without cracking the Yellow Pages.

If neither you nor your staff have web development chops, you’ll likely be searching for a designer that can build you a site from scratch.  A well designed website is a great asset, but business-wise, hiring help from the outside can pose a few problems.

Mainly, it can be expensive.  And while the initial investment in a good looking, functional site is well worth it, the second issue is that websites (and your business) will change.  If your website is custom built, you’ll have to go back through the designer (if he or she is still available) to make updates — and it may cost you each time.

If you like to be in control of your web presence at all times, and save some money in the process, consider the advantages of using an online blogging platform as your company’s main website.  Here are some of the pros.

Attractive Design

A hosted blog with the right theme or template can look as good as a custom website.  Whether your platform is WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, or Posterous, there are plenty of well-designed (and often free) themes you can download, plug in, and customize easily.

Some customization resources include:

- Wordpress Theme Directory
- Deluxe Templates for Blogger
- Tumblr Theme Garden
- Posterous Themes

If you really need something that’s one-of-a-kind, ask your web designer to build you a blog theme instead of a static website.  This way, you’ll have a custom site that you can update yourself for the long term.

No need for web hosting services

While web hosting for static pages is relatively inexpensive these days, accounts on these blogging platforms are absolutely free, and all of your data is stored on the web.

Creation and updates are free and easily accessible

Blog accounts are free to register and easy to maintain via the web.  Like web e-email, anyone on your team with a login and password can access and update your site as needed.

Updates don’t require coding or developers

Once your blog site is in place, making changes and updates doesn’t require any technical skill.  Simply add a post, edit a post, or re-arrange your layout.

A platform for dynamic content is built right into your site

Even if your business model is fairly straightforward, and doesn’t require a lot of community engagement, it’s still a good idea to publish something every now and then to let customers, employees, and investors know what’s up.

Even if it’s just a re-hash of your monthly newsletter, some dynamic content on your “Internet Storefront” reminds visitors that your team is still hard at work behind the scenes.

If your business is ready to take the next step toward social media engagement, it’s very easy to add Twitter widgets, Facebook Fan Page badges, and other items that will connect your website to your social campaigns.

Important things to know

If all these advantages make sense for your business, there’s still a bit of homework to be done before you take the blog-site plunge.  Take note of these guidelines to ensure your website meets the professional standards of your business.

Learn a bit of HTML

While most of the functionality that makes blogging platforms easy and fun to use is baked right in, knowing the basics of HTML will go a long way to ensuring that your site will look and read the way you intend it to.

WordPress actually has a static front page feature built into its settings, making it one of the best options for a business site.

Unfortunately, the other blogging platforms mentioned above do not yet have this functionality, but you can “trick” them into creating a front page.  Simply add a blog post and date it years in the future.  Thus, it will always be the “newest” post, and always appear at the top of your site.

Matt Silverman

Find and Organize Waves

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Education      No comments

Feb
9

Reduce Wave Inbox Clutter and Unwanted Notifications

Once you’re participating in a significant number of active waves, your Inbox gets busy fast.

Every time a wave updates, it moves to the top of your Inbox and its subject line turns bold. Wave’s instant, real-time notifications are a double-edged sword: wonderful when you’re waiting for important updates, terrible when new information you don’t care about distracts you. The Archive and Unfollow buttons can help you clean out your Inbox and silence chatty waves one by one.

Archive Waves

Wave’s Archive feature works like it does in Gmail: when you archive a wave, it moves out of your Inbox to “All” waves. The wave is still findable and accessible by clicking the All link on the Navigation panel, but it doesn’t appear in your Inbox. If someone updates an archived wave, however, it reappears in your Inbox as a wave with unread content.

To archive a wave, open it and click the Archive button on its toolbar. To archive several waves in one shot, select them individually by ticking their checkboxes in the Search panel. Alternately, select an series of waves by ticking a wave’s checkbox, then holding down the Shift key, and clicking on another one down the list. Once you’ve selected the appropriate waves, click the Archive button on the Search panel’s toolbar.

To “unarchive” a wave and move it back to your Inbox, select it and click the Inbox button on the Search panel.

Unfollow and Follow Waves

Ever get added to an email chain you don’t care about—but that just won’t stop showing up in your Inbox with reply after reply? In Wave, to stop getting notifications that a particular wave has updated, you can “unfollow” it. Select the wave and click the Unfollow button on its toolbar. An unfollowed wave still updates as participants edit it, but you won’t get a notification that there’s new content to read. If you search for that wave, its contents and all its updates are still available, even though you didn’t get every new change notification. Unfollowed waves have a special gray “Unfollowed” label on them when they appear in search results, as shown in Figure 4-1.

In the Wave preview, there’s no way to remove yourself from a wave someone else added you to. If someone adds you to a wave you don’t care about, unfollow it to opt out of its update notifications. You can always find waves you’ve unfollowed using the is:unfollowed operator in Wave’s search box.

Similarly, if there’s a public wave that you want to get update notifications about in your Inbox, select it and click the Follow button. This will have the same effect as if someone added you individually to that wave: any time that public wave updates it will appear as a new wave in your Inbox. Click the Unfollow button on a wave to unfollow it.

Mark Waves Read or Unread

Like Follow/Unfollow and Archive, there is also a Read and Unread button on the Wave toolbar in both the Search panel and in an open wave. When you click the Read button, a wave does not appear bold or with new blips in the Search panel. When you click the Unread button on an open wave or selected wave(s), all the blips in those waves get marked as unread, and the wave becomes bold in the Search panel.

There is currently no way to mark individual blips within a wave as unread. To mark an individual blip as read, click on it to select it.

“Delete” Waves

To send a wave to the Trash, select or open it and click the Trash button on the Search panel toolbar or on the wave’s own toolbar. Currently, trashing a wave doesn’t actually delete it; the wave still exists in the Trash folder. Deleting a wave entirely would be the equivalent of removing yourself from it as a participant, and since removing non-bot participants is not yet possible, neither is actually deleting waves. On October 30th, 2009 Google Wave product manager Greg Dalesandre said that the ability to delete waves and remove participants from waves is “coming soon.”

File Waves in Folders (and Sub-folders)

Like most email clients (except Gmail!), Wave offers a traditional folder system for filing your waves.To create a new folder, go to the Navigation panel, click the + (plus) button next to Folders, and type the name of your folder. The name can be as long as you like, and can contain spaces and special characters (such as punctuation).

To create a sub-folder, click a folder’s drop-down menu and select Add Folder. The sub-folder appears indented beneath its parent folder, as shown in Figure 4-2.

To delete or rename a folder, click its drop-down and select Delete or Rename. (Know that you cannot delete folders that have sub-folders in them unless all of the sub-folders have been deleted first. The Delete item does not appear in a parent folder’s drop-down menu until its sub-folders are deleted.) From the same folder drop-down menu, you can also customize the order of your folder list, and assign colors to folders.

To move a wave into a folder, go to the Search panel and select the wave. Click the Move to button on the toolbar, and then select the destination folder from the list.

If your browser has the Google Gears plug-in installed, you can drag and drop a wave or several waves from the Search panel onto a folder name.

When you move a wave to a folder, you’re transferring it from its current location to the destination. A wave cannot be in more than one folder at a time. Only you can see and use the folders you create, and control them. Therefore, Wave folders are best for private, single-destination filing.

If old-school folders are too limiting and private for your purposes, use tags instead.

Tag Your Waves

Tags provide a more free-form way to “file” your waves. Unlike folders, you can add as many tags to the waves you participate in as you want. Also unlike folders, everyone who is participating in the wave can see those tags, add to them, and delete them. Tags do not appear on your Navigation panel. They show up only at the bottom of open waves, and in the Search panel on each wave listed there.

To add a tag to a wave, first open the wave. On its bottom panel, click the + (plus) button to the right of the word Tags, as shown in Figure 4-3. Enter a tag and press Enter. To add another tag, repeat. You can add only one tag at a time, and tag names can have spaces in them. To remove a tag, hover over it and click the red X that appears.

Like hash tags on Twitter, or bookmark tags on Delicious, your wave’s tags are “public” in the sense that anyone who can see that wave can also see its tags. Therefore, tags are a great way for people to add their waves to a pool of waves on the same topic.

Already the Wave community is coming up with common tags for organizing public discussions like WaveDiscuss and WaveHelp. Search for with:public WaveDiscuss to see them—and learn about more advanced search techniques like this in the following sections.

Search Your Waves

Wave puts a deep repository of live-updating information at your fingertips, but it’s a complete mess unless you know how to find what you’re looking for. The Wave search box, much like Google’s web search box, is the key to getting exactly the results you need. Basic keyword searches return waves that contain those terms, while advanced search terms can pinpoint specific waves based on recipients, tags, and other attributes.

Basic Search Techniques

Common search engine conventions you’re already comfortable using in Google and Yahoo web search work in Wave as well. To search for waves that contain a keyword like “browncoat,” just enter browncoat into the search box and press Enter. To find all waves that contain the words “Kaylee” or “browncoat,” separate the keywords with an uppercase “or”: Kaylee OR browncoat. If you want waves that have both the words “Kaylee” and “browncoat” in them, enter Kaylee browncoat. (This query returns the same results as a search for Kaylee AND browncoat. By default, adding words to your query narrows results to only waves that contain all the terms.)

To search for an exact phrase like “I don’t wanna explode”, enclose it in quotes. This works well for proper names, too: a search for “Joss Whedon” does not return waves with just the words “Joss” in them, or even waves that mention “Joss” in one place and “Whedon” in the other.

The minus sign also excludes waves that match certain criteria from your results. If you want to find waves that mention Firefly but not Buffy, you’d search for Firefly -Buffy.

These basic search techniques get you pretty far. But Wave’s real search power comes in its special search terms that return waves based on participants, tags, folders, and other attributes.

Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Title or Caption

The format of Wave’s advanced search operators is operator:value. Just as you can search the web and narrow results using a query like site:completewaveguide.com Firefly, you can do the same with Wave. The trick is knowing which operators do what.

By default, a basic keyword search looks in the title and body of the waves you participate in. To limit your search to just wave titles, use title:keyword. Enclose multiple words in quotes. To search all your wave titles for the word “Reavers,” search for title:Reavers. To search for all wave titles with the words “space opera,” search for title:”space opera”.

Because you can associate captions with images in Wave, you can also specifically search the contents of captions. To search image captions, use the caption:keyword operator. For example, to search waves that contain images with “Gina Torres” in the caption, search for caption:”Gina Torres”.

Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Participants

Waves are collaborative documents and conversations, so you’ll want to know how to find waves by the people involved in them. These search operators help you find wave participants based on their role in the wave: whether they’ve created it, been added to it, or contributed to it. In this list, name doesn’t refer to a person’s full name; it’s the first part of his or her Wave ID. That is, if the Wave user’s ID is zoe@serenity.com, replace name with zoe.

You can also use the keyword me to refer to yourself. For example, if your Wave ID is you@example.com, you could find waves you created using creator:you@example.com, or the shorter, simpler creator:me.

Here is the full list of Wave search operators that find waves based on their participants.

If you’re getting unexpected results when you search for waves by participant, remember a wave’s structure: a given wave can consist of many blips with different participants. For instance, a group wave with half a dozen participants that has a private reply to just one person in it will show up in search results for onlyto:name searches for that one person.

Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Location or Read State

You may want to find waves based on what folder they’re in, what tag they have, or whether they’re read, unread, followed, or unfollowed. Here’s the full list of advanced Wave search operators that return waves based on location and state.

Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Attachment, Gadget, or Links

To narrow search results to waves with file attachments, gadgets, or links in them use these advanced operators.

Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Time Period

So far Wave’s menu of search operators is pretty thorough—but strangely, date searches aren’t what you’d expect. Instead of searching for waves by a specific date, you search by time period relative to today’s date using a date term value.

In its search documentation, Google explains:

Accepted date terms are day, week, month, or year. You can abbreviate days, weeks, months, and years to a single letter—d, w, m, and y, respectively. You can also add N before any of the date operators to specify the number of days, weeks, months, or years over which you’d like to search. N must be greater than zero. For example, searching with past:3days will find waves from today, yesterday, and the day before yesterday.

The full list of relative date term operators is as follows.

Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Language

Although it doesn’t appear in Wave’s official search documentation, Wave can also search waves by what language they’re written in with the lang:lang_abbrev operator. For example, lang:en returns waves written in English. To see only public waves not written in English, use the with:public -lang:en operator. Use this operator with caution: because it is undocumented, its behavior could be unpredictable (especially with waves that contain text in multiple languages).

The more you use Wave, the more you’ll notice that advanced searches for waves are baked into its interface. For example, your Inbox is the results of an in:inbox search. The Trash is just results for an in:trash search.

You can even see recent conversations with a specific person by clicking the Recent Waves button on the Contact pop-up—that displays results for a with:name search, where name is the contact in question.

Combine Wave Search Operators into Useful Recipes

Wave’s search capabilities are most powerful when you chain criteria together to see custom lists of your waves. Here are a few useful Wave search recipes you can try.

• Search public waves with with:public: To find public discussions about almost anything, search using the with:public operator, which returns waves with public@a.gwave.com as a participant. For example, to search all public waves for the word “browncoats,” use with:public browncoats.
• Create an only-to-me Inbox with onlyto:me is:unread: See unread waves in which you and the creator are the only participants. This is a great way to find waves you probably need to respond to.
• See “Sent” waves with creator:me -is:note: See all the waves you’ve created and added others to participate in; this set of results creates something loosely akin to an email program’s Sent box.
• See waves you’ve created for private use with is:note: Even though Wave is a collaboration tool, you can still create waves and add no other participants, whether you’re in the process of drafting something to share later, or just keeping some “notes to self.” The is:note operator returns only waves you’ve created, and in which you’re the only participant.

Once you tweak your favorite searches to fit your needs, you can save them for reuse.

Saved Searches and Wave Filters

Now that you’ve concocted your favorite wave queries, you can save them for reuse on the Navigation panel. To do so, enter your query in the search box and press Enter to run it. At the bottom of the Search panel, click the Save search button, then enter a name for your search in the Title field. Click the Submit button to save it, as shown in Figure 4-4.

Once you’ve saved a search, it appears on the Navigation panel under Searches (just above Folders). Like folders, you can click a search’s drop-down menu to edit the query or its name, move it up or down the saved searches list, or add a color to it. Also like folders, you can create a new saved search by clicking the + (plus) button next to Searches on the Navigation panel.

Filter Incoming Waves Based on Search Criteria

The Save search pop-up also contains another interesting and powerful section: Filter Actions. Like email filtering rules, here you can tell Wave to automatically perform actions on waves that meet the search criteria in the Query field.

In the Wave preview, there are only two available filter actions: Mark as read and Archive. By checking the Archive box on a saved search, you’re telling Wave to automatically move any waves that meet the search criteria out of your Inbox. By checking the Mark as read box on a saved search, you’re telling Wave to mark those waves as read. (Automatically checking a wave as read has a similar effect as unfollowing a wave in that you’re suppressing unread notifications, except that the state of these waves is read, not unfollowed.) Checking both boxes means new waves that meet your search criteria are both archived and marked as read.

http://completewaveguide.com

Google Gmail Getting Social Features

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in News      No comments

Feb
9

In an escalation of its rivalry with Facebook, Google plans to turn Gmail into a social data hub.

Google is reportedly planning to make Gmail more social by allowing users to exchange status updates with friends and share Web content links, features that moves Gmail into more direct competition with Facebook.

News of the plan was revealed on Monday by The Wall Street Journal.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, the company on Monday did invite journalists “to see some innovations in two of our most popular products” at a media event to be held Tuesday at the company’s Mountain View, Calif. headquarters.

After Google Search, Gmail is one of Google’s most popular products.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Gmail users will gain a module that displays status updates from selected Google contacts, a form of interaction popularized by Facebook and MySpace and also embraced by Yahoo.

These status updates will eventually include content shared by one’s Google contacts through other Google properties, such as YouTube and Picasa.

Facebook’s walled-off form of social computing is seen as one of the few forces that threatens Google’s online advertising empire. In response to that threat, Google has spent the past few years adding social features to encourage social interaction among users of its services.

SOURCE: InformationWeek

Real Time Voice Translation is On the Way, Thanks to Google

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in News      No comments

Feb
9

Real time voice translation is on the way and Google aims to pioneer it.

The Internet giant wants to develop its smartphone technology to translate speech in real time.

The company would combine its advanced voice recognition know-how with its text translation service to create a mobile phone that acts as an instant interpreter.

Head of translation services Franz Och said: “We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time.“Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on.”

‘Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch,’ said Mr Och. ‘But recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you.’

Google has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents.

However Google admits speech will be an even tougher challenge than text but says a customer’s phone would adapt to its user by ‘learning’ their style of talking.

Source: The Times

Manage Your Wave Contacts

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Education      No comments

Feb
8

Add and Remove Individual Contacts to Wave

Your Wave Contacts list is a subset of your Google account’s existing Contacts list. Anyone who signs up for Wave using a Google account that’s already in your Gmail Contacts list shows up in your Wave Contacts panel automatically. You can also add and remove people from your Wave Contacts list by hand.

Add Someone to Your Wave Contacts List

You can add people to your Wave Contacts list only if they already have a Wave account. During the invitation-only Wave preview, that’s a limited number of people. If someone you know has a Wave ID, you can add him or her to your Wave Contacts list in several ways, depending on the context:

• Inside a wave: If you’ve joined a wave with someone who isn’t currently one of your contacts, adding them as a contact is simple. Just click the contact’s icon displayed at the top of the wave and then click the Add to contacts button displayed in the Contact profile pop-up, as shown in Figure 3-1. Your new contact instantly joins the top of your Contacts list.

• From the Contacts panel: There are two methods for adding a new Wave contact from the Contacts panel in the lower-left area of the Wave client. Both require that you know the Gmail address or Wave ID of the person you’d like to add. (Either works, as Wave automatically recognizes and converts Gmail addresses to Wave IDs—e.g., mal@gmail.com becomes mal@googlewave.com).If you enter the ID of your desired contact directly into the Contacts search box, Wave informs you that the contact could not be found (among your current contacts), then asks you if you’d like to add that user to your Contacts list. Click the Add to contacts button and you’re set.

  Alternately, click the + (plus) button in the lower-right corner of the Contacts panel to launch the Add a new contact pop-up, as shown in Figure 3-2. Again, just enter the Gmail address or Wave ID of the user you want to add, and—assuming that person has a Wave account—it asks you to confirm that you’d like to add that user to your contacts. Click Submit to confirm.

• From your Google Contacts manager: As we mentioned earlier, Wave pulls in contacts from your Google account, which means that every one of your Gmail contacts who is also using Wave appears in your Wave Contacts list automatically. It also means that you can manage your Wave contacts through the Google Contacts interface.

  

  Figure 3-3. You can add a new contact or edit existing contacts’ information in Google Contacts.

  To access Google Contacts, click the Manage contacts link at the bottom of the Wave Contacts panel. There you can add a new contact by clicking the + (plus) button in the upper-left corner of the page. Google Contacts opens a New Contact form, where you can add your new Wave contact’s name and Gmail address or Wave ID, along with additional contact information like phone number, address, birthday, and more, as shown in Figure 3-3.

You can also edit information for any of your contacts in Google Contacts by searching for the user in question, opening their information panel, and adding or removing any bits of info you like.

Remove Someone from Your Wave Contacts List

If you’ve decided, for whatever reason, that you want to remove someone from your Wave Contacts list, you can only do so by entirely deleting that user from Google Contacts. Here’s how.

1. Click the Manage contacts link at the bottom of the Wave Contacts panel, which opens Google Contacts in a new window.
2. Find the contact you want to remove by either entering the contact’s name or Google username (his username is the “you” portion of the you@googlewave.com address) into the Google Contacts search box.
3. Once you’ve found the contact you’re looking for, click that contact’s name in the middle column of Google Contacts to display his contact information.
4. Click the Delete contact button in the upper-right corner of the contact information panel, as shown in Figure 3-4.

Keep in mind that Google Contacts is the central contact management tool for all Google applications associated with your Google account, so removing a Wave contact using Google Contacts also removes that contact from every Google application you use, from Gmail and Picasa, to Google Voice and Chat.

Remove a Participant from an Individual Wave

It’s not difficult to accidentally add a contact to a wave that you hadn’t meant to include her on. Chances are your boss isn’t interested in joining a wave with your friends in which you’re discussing where to go out this weekend, for example, and you’ll want to remove her the minute you realize the mistake. If you were composing an email, you’d simply remove the accidental contact addition before you sent the email, but because Wave is so different from email, removing a contact has larger implications.

This presents a bit of a problem, and frankly, it’s one that the Wave team has yet to address. Within a wave with several participants, you can have a private conversation with one or more participants inline. You can also copy a wave into a fresh wave to which you can add (or not add) whomever you like. However, currently there is no way to remove a contact from a wave once she has been added.

There is one exception to this rule: unlike human participants, you can remove bots from a wave at any time.

Add a Group of Participants to a Wave

If you want to wave with a specific (or large) group of people, adding one contact at a time is a tedious process. To address this, Wave has preliminary support for participant groups using Google Groupsto manage members and invitations. To get started with groups in Wave, you can either join an existing Google Group or create your own Google Group. Then, learn how to use the special “public” group and access permissions to control how you let others participate in your waves.

Use an Existing Google Group in Wave

If you’re already a member of a Google Group, using it in Wave is a piece of cake. All you’ve got to do is add the Google Group to your Wave Contact list the same way you added new contacts above, using the email address of the Google Group as the address of the new contact.

If you’re not a member of any Google Groups, you can search for a group you’re interested in joining at the Google Groups homepage at http://groups.google.com.

Once you’ve added the Google Group as a Wave contact, you can give all the members of a Google Group access to any wave by adding that contact as a participant on that wave. When members of the Google Group search for group:address, where address is the email address of the Google Group, they will find waves with that group, as shown in Figure 3-8.

Unfortunately Wave’s current implementation of groups is less than perfect. Email messages to a Google Group don’t show up in Wave, and waves to a Google Group don’t show up via email. You also can’t add new users to your Wave group from inside Wave. Wave Product Manager Steph Hannon called group support via Google Groups “a bit tricky” right now and said the team is working on making it easier.

Create Your Own Wave Group Using Google Groups

If you can’t find an existing Google Group you’d like to use in Wave, you can create your own in a few steps:

1. Visit the Create a group page at Google Groups.
2. Give your group a name, an email address (which you’ll need when you add the group as a contact in Wave), and a description, as shown in Figure 3-9. Set the access level for your group. It can be Public, Announcement-only, or Restricted so only people you invite can join.
3. Click the Create my group button to finish. Once created, you can invite members to the group from your Google contacts or just let new members find you.

Once you’ve created your group, starting waves with the group works the same way as we described above. Add the group’s email address as a contact in Wave, then add that contact to any wave you’d like include the group in.

If you’re an administrator of your group, you can tweak your group’s access settings to fit your needs by clicking the Access link on your group’s settings page. Keep in mind that most access settings won’t change when the group is used in Wave. Only the following settings will change how the group works in Wave:

• Who can view messages?
  • “Only members can view group content” – Only group members may view waves whose participants include this group. Any individual participants will also be able to view the wave.
  • “Anybody can view group content” – Any users may view waves with this group. They’ll need to either search for the wave or have a direct link to the wave.

• Who can post messages?
  • Managers only – Only managers of the group will be able to add the group to waves or edit waves with that group.
  • Members only – Only members of the group will be able to add the group to waves or edit waves with that group.
  • Anyone can post – Anyone can add the group to waves or edit waves with that group.

The “Public” Group

A special system group in the Wave preview, public@a.gwave.com, represents every user in Wave. Therefore, if you add public@a.gwave.com to your contacts and to a wave, you are giving everyone access to the wave—you’re making it public. As you learned in Chapter 2, a search for with:public will return all waves on which public@a.gwave.com is a participant.

The public group can be squirrely at times and disappear from your Contacts list, which makes it difficult to add to a wave. See Chapter 5’s “How to Make a Wave Public” section to learn about a bot that simplifies the process of making waves public.

Group and Individual Access

In Chapter 2 you learned how to limit participants’ access to waves to read only or reply only. You can apply these access permissions to groups in the same exact way: just click on the group’s icon at the top of the wave, and set the permission level from the drop-down in the pop-up menu.

The most important thing to know about group permissions is that an individual participant’s access trumps that of the group, even if he or she is a member of the group. For example, if the public group has read-only access, you can add specific participants to it and give them full access. When you do, they will be able to edit blips in the wave, even though they’re part of the public group which only has read-only access.

This combination of different group and individual wave participant access gives you more control over what you can share in wave without fear of vandalism.

Ping a Contact

Sometimes you want to initiate a quick back-and-forth with a contact, especially if you can see she’s online. In the pre-Wave world, you’d use instant messenger to do that. Sure, every piece of communication in Wave is real-time, but you don’t want to compose a full-on wave to ask someone a quick question. Further, the pop-up notification of a new instant messenger session is still a useful mechanism for getting a contact’s attention. That’s where Wave’s ping feature comes in.

A ping is the easiest way to start a quick exchange with one or more Wave contacts. You compose your ping’s message in a smaller, chat-like window (unlike regular waves). Much like IM, a new ping pops up and flashes its contents on its recipients’ screens and browser tabs.

To get someone’s attention in Wave with a ping, click his name in the Contacts panel to open his Contact information pop-up. Then, click the Ping User button (where User is that contact’s name).

The ping panel appears near the top of your window, pulled down with enough room for you to type a short ping message, as shown in Figure 3-11. The ping panel minimizes to the top of your recipient’s Wave client, but it flashes green to indicate an active, incoming ping. The text of your ping also flashes in your recipient’s browser tab.

Apart from its location and smaller size, a ping looks—and acts—like a regular wave. If your contact is offline when you ping him, Wave displays that flashing, minimized ping to him the next time he logs in.

While you’re chatting back and forth with a contact in a ping, the conversation stays out of your Wave Inbox. Once you close the ping, that conversation moves into your Inbox as a regular wave. If you’d like to view a ping in a larger wave panel from the start, click the Expand button at the top of the ping panel. (It’s the middle icon that looks like the Restore button in Microsoft Windows.)

In-Wave Pings

You can also ping a contact from a wave. If you’ve already got a wave open with a contact you’d like to ping, click your contact’s icon at the top of the open wave and, as before, click the Ping User button.

However, when you start a ping from inside a wave, the ping displays inside that wave for both you and whomever you’re pinging, as shown in Figure 3-12—it does not pop up an attention-getting notification. An in-wave ping is a handy way to have an off-topic or private back-and-forth with one or more participants without involving every other wave participant. In fact, an in-wave ping behaves very much like a private reply.

Add More Participants to a Ping

You can add other participants to a ping the same way you add them to a wave: click the + (plus) button at the top of the ping (next to the contact icons) and search for the contact(s) you want to add. Because pings “minimize” when they’re not active, you can’t drag and drop contacts to a ping from the Contacts panel.

When to Ping?

In much the same way as you might start a chat with someone inside Gmail rather than send an email, you ping someone to start a quick, real-time exchange. Pings work best when you want to have a quick chat, or get someone’s attention in Wave if you see that he or she is online.

If a Wave user is online, Wave adds a small green dot to the lower-right corner of that person’s icon anywhere it appears in the Wave client—from the Contacts panel and Search panel to open waves, as shown in Figure 3-13. If you see a green dot on a contact’s icon, they’ll see your ping straightaway. (Even if your recipient has Wave open in a background tab, that tab’s title will flash and show your ping’s contents.)

Edit Your Wave Profile

Your Wave profile contains identifying information about you: your name, photo, web site, and a status message. Other users see your profile information in the pop-up that appears when they click your icon in the Contacts panel or at the top of any wave.

To edit your Wave profile, click your icon or name at the top of the Contacts panel, and then click the Edit Profile button on the Profile pop-up. This opens a wave where you can set your profile information, as shown in Figure 3-14.

In this wave, you can set how your name appears to other Wave users, your Wave icon photo, your web site, and your Wave status message, which appears next to your icon and name on the Contacts panel.

Set Your Wave Status

To add a little more personality to your Wave pop-up profile, you can set a status message that becomes visible to your Wave contacts—much like you can in Google Chat or other instant messaging applications. While not integrated with any other Google service (yet), you can use the status message for traditional, functional purposes, like telling your contacts that you’re busy (handy because Wave doesn’t let you set generic statuses like “busy” or “away”), or you can just use it to remind them that “Everything’s shiny, Cap’n.”

To set your status, click your name or icon at the top of the Contacts panel and type your desired status message into the text box below your name, as shown in Figure 3-15. Press Enter or close the Contact pop-up to set it. Your status will persist through Wave sessions and remain set even if you log into Wave from different computers.

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