Manage Your Wave Contacts

From The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave

A collaboration tool like Wave is only as good as the collaborators using it with you. In this chapter, you'll learn how to manage your Wave contacts.

The Contacts panel is but a small element in the lower-left area of the Wave client, but it holds the key to what makes Wave go: people. You know how to make waves, but the magic happens when others participate in them with you. As Wave rolls out to more people—including your friends, family, and co-workers—you'll want to add them to your waves. Here's how to add, remove, and contact people you want to communicate with in Wave, and how to set up your Wave profile.

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,^[1] 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.

Figure 3-1. Add a wave's participant to your Contacts list by clicking that contact's icon and then clicking the Add to contacts button.

• 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.

Figure 3-2. If you already know someone's Gmail address or Wave ID, you can add that person as a contact from the Contacts panel.

• 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.^[2]
  
  
  

  

  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.^[3]

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 do so only 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.

Figure 3-4. Permanently remove a contact from your Wave Contacts list by deleting that contact in Google Contacts.

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 (see Chapter 5, Dive Deeper into Wave for more). 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.

Figure 3-5. Wave currently does not allow you to remove regular participants from a Wave. A Remove button displays when you click on a contact's profile picture on top of a wave, but it's disabled.

There is one exception to this rule: unlike human participants, you can remove bots from a wave at any time. We'll discuss bots more in Chapter 8, Wave Bots, but for now all you need to know is that to remove a bot from a wave at any time, just click on the bot's profile image at the top of an open wave, then click the Remove button—which is enabled only for bots—as shown in Figure 3-6.

Figure 3-6. While you can't remove human participants from a wave, you can easily remove bots by clicking on their profile image, then clicking the Remove button.

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 Groups^[4] to 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.

Figure 3-7. You can add a Google Group to your Wave contacts the same way you add other contacts: just paste the Google Group's email address into the new contact field.

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.^[5] 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.

Figure 3-8. When members of a Google Group search for group:address, where address is the email address of the Google Group, they will find waves with that group—like these results for The Complete Guide to Google Wave Wavers group, found by searching for group:wave-guide-wavers@googlegroups.com.

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"^[6] 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.^[7]
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.

Figure 3-9. You can create your own Google Group and use that to start group discussions in Wave.

Figure 3-10. Click the Join this group link to join a Google Group.

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:^[9]

• 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 it 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.^[10] 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.

Figure 3-11. Quickly start a wave with other participants by pinging them.

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. For more on private replies, see Chapter 5, Dive Deeper into Wave.

Figure 3-12. Start a private conversation with one or more members of a wave without including everyone with an inline ping.

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.

Figure 3-13. You can see which participants—or which of your contacts—is online by looking for the green dot on the bottom right corner of the contact icon.

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.

Figure 3-14. Edit the information that people see about you in Wave by editing your Wave Profile.

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."

Figure 3-15. Set your status by clicking your contact icon in the Contacts panel.

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.

Once you've made a few dozen waves, go to the next chapter to learn how to find and organize your waves.

References

1. ↑ Google Wave Help: How do I add contacts?, Google.com
2. ↑ Google Contacts, Google.com
3. ↑ Google Wave Help: How do I edit my contact's information?, Google.com
4. ↑ Google Groups, Google.com
5. ↑ Waving with Groups, The Google Wave Blog
6. ↑ Steph Hannon, Twitter.com
7. ↑ Create a group, Google Groups
8. ↑ The Complete Guide to Google Wave Wavers group, Google Groups
9. ↑ How do Google Groups access settings interact with waves?, Google Wave Help
10. ↑ Google Wave Help: What is 'ping'?, Google.com