Hidden Gems from Untold Treasures: October 2009

Google Wave My First Preview

Latest Update: Google Wave is been donated to Apache and currently it is in incubation state at Apache Wave.

I have received an invite to preview Google Wave. Happy and glad to be part of Wave community. And would love to share my first look of Google Wave. In case, you would like, I may ~~send an invite~~ nominate you also. Please let me know if you are interested to preview Google Wave.

First important thing, I have observed, after logging in using my existing Gmail id to Google Wave, is a screen which has three panels and one blank panel for opening/creating new wave. Well, I do not want to stretch your curiosity, please find attached screen shot from from Google Wave opened using Google Chrome.

You may curious by this time what is exactly Wave means. In Google's Own Words,

A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5's offline storage and web workers enable to use desktop like features without compromising on performance.

The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the "live" concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service.

My observations:

The look and feel as well as usability of the Google Wave is very easy, beautiful, useful
I have received a new email id with "GoogleWave.com" domain id.
I can open Google Wave in FireFox 3.5.3 correctly. IE 8 has extension mark for moderator.appscout.com panel.

As Google advises on Google Wave Development blogsite they will be extending the preview for IE 8. To utilize Google Wave in IE 8, they expect IE 8 user to install Google Chrome Frame.
- Google Wave Log-in preview in FireFox 3.5.3
- Google Wave Login-in preview in IE 8
In regular Google tradition, there are lots of videos on Google Wave, Google Wave APIs, Google Wave Extensions etc topics.
Wave is part email part document part conversation. It is collaborating workspace to wave around. Basic functionalities which could be done with Google Wave are
- Start new wave
- Reply to wave
- Read new unread wave by just hitting spacebar
- Install extensions for rich contents and integration with other systems.
- Attach photos and files by drag-drop functionality
- Of course you can spell check your wave.
- Organize waves in folders and...
- Search your waves...
Google goes in length to tell you when you can use Google Wave like for email, meeting notes, photo and document organization etc etc
Google Wave API and Google Wave Extensions/Gadgets are some of the topics, I am curious to know in more depth.

Interestingly Google Wave provides some out of box extensions. Here is a brief list of extensions available right now:
- Wave Sudoku
- Conference
- Video Chat Experience
- Trippy :
  Co-create an itinerary: choose points of interest -- including Lonely Planet recommendations, organize, share, print, or export to My Maps!
- Yes/No/May Be Gadgets
  This one is my favorite. It allows my wave visitor/reader to choose a response like "Yes/No/Maybe". Isn't it awesome.
- Map Gadget
- Extension Installer
  It is written by Google. Allows developers to create new Extension Installers.
- You can find more extensions here.
I am positively impressed with the tool. I appreciate the gracious sanction of my request to get me in Google Wave review to experience before lots of other cool nice people around.
From my perspective it is the rich online collaboration tool which allows to perform all those things what MS Outlook and other desktop email + collaboration tools allow you to do. From my perspective, we are observing the rise of groupwares in Virtual World like we have used Lotus Notes, Outlook and such tools.

I see tremendous value and potential in extensions and integrating Google Wave to manage my all contacts, related social media relation ships and various artifacts.

I am in a situation like any young child who is been presented with a new toy, how excited he/she with toy and try to figure out what games could be played with it. Hopefully I would figure out more and more interesting things from Google Wave.

Update

Seems like this virtual social blogsphere has intuition of its own. After I have posted my curiosity about Google Wave use cases in front of the world, I have found this very interesting blog post titled "Google Wave's Best Use Cases" from LifeHacker.com.

I have found out that SalesForce.com and SAP's research lab are early adopters of technology and are working on a Google Wave extension that facilitates real-time, collaborative development of business processes.
Just in case you, you are curious to know and to review Google Wave, I have ~~eight~~ six ~~invites~~ nominations which I can share with you and spread technology love of Google wave...
Update

After I have submitted Google Invite for my precious and important visitors, I have received this message from Google Wave.

Invite others to Google Wave

Google Wave is more fun when you have others to wave with, so please nominate people you would like to add. Keep in mind that this is a preview so it could be a bit rocky at times.

Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.

Happy waving!

Happy Waving...Enjoy...

Clixpy a usability tool for webmasters, bloggers and designers

Like to find out how usable your site is ? What actions does visitor take at your site ? how user session has progressed ? Well, you can get all this insight and more using Clixpy. It is a online tool which captures every user visit, page view, page load and other important things. It tracks everything your site’s users do: mouse movement, clicks, scrolling, form inputs. You can watch and examine videos showing your users’ actions.

Also Clixpy guides to features which are difficult for visitors to use and which are easy, where your users spend more time and importantly why they leave your website. When equipped with this knowledge, you can optimize your landing pages and may convert visitors to be subscriber, clients and/or regular visitor.

If this all made you curious and would want to try the tool to garner more detailed information of your web site, please visit Clixpy.

There are two ways to experience Clixpy. You have 9 free sessions or you can buy more sessions. In first 9 free sessions, you can use Clixpy with as many domains and sites as you like.You can buy 100 captures to 1000 captures for a price range of $5 to $50 respectively. And you get to use your PayPal account. :D)

Registering is easy. Share your email, provide password and may "optionally" provide company name, company website link . The registration will be followed by a activation email sent to your email address. So make sure you give correct address. Once you have actiation email, click on activation link and login with user id ( i.e. email address) and password.

First login will take you to a page with three tabs. Play Session, Install and Buy Captures. Install tab will be active. Copy javascript from install tab, insert the script to your website's template/html source just before end of head html tag.

The same script could be used on multiple domains and sites. And you will have a choice to play sessions from each domain or particular website. IF you are interested in playing demo of the Clixpy, you can take a look here.

Here is the screen shot from my account:

My first session has been captured and ready to be played as seen in this screen shot.

First observation is that You can turn on and off session tracking using the "Tracking Session" on/off button.
Second thing if you do not want your browser to be tracked, especially if you have eCommerce site and you keep performing money transaction, then you can disable Clixpy for your site especially where you are asking user is entering credit card by manually adding attribute noclixpy="true" to such elements.
Third good thing I have liked is I can use Clixpy in IE 8, FireFox 3.5.x, Safari 4.x and Chrome with similar experience and no issue so far.
It could not track Flash session though.
No visible difference in page load or user activities as it uses tiny javascript with AJAX.
If you do not want your browser to be tracked by Clixpy. Then by adding a cookie Clixpy will not trace your browser.Here is the page for disabling Clixpy.
Last but not least, they claim that they do not track or capture any input with type "password"