Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

Google are on a roll and introducing the Priority Inbox (in beta) -- an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail, identifying important email and separating it out from everything else:

“Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this “bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.”

Here it is in action

According to their blog The Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread”, “Starred”, and “Everything else”. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you.

Google wave is to be no more, the Google team in Sydney, having put a lot of effort into an innovative new product will see the technology developed in a different way.  What happened?  Wave had some internal competition from Google Buzz, and users were having to get used to two very different ways of communicating.  And in both cases you need someone to communicate with. A very active Sydney Wave user group dived into the technology, visited Google HQ and began to experiment.  Here are some of their discussions on hearing the news but first, from the Google blog:

… Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow

I didn’t know you could be a Google Fellow! But that aside, here are comments from the wave user group in Sydney on their experience with using wave and interacting with the Google Wave team. The discussion took place on facebook, but some of the points raised are so pertinent I wanted to post them here. I agree with Tony’s comment:

Tony Cosentino

It’s funny, I was at a gathering the night before the announcement and when wave came up in conversation someone said ‘does anyone even use it?’ Most agreed not.

I made a statement that I believed they had rolled out BUZZ and WAVE the wrong way around. I think WAVE should have been offered to all gmail users from the beginning to allow a critical mass to use and understand it. It was so hard to try putting groups together in the beginning with limited invites it all became like a secret cult with little documentation.

I feel for Gina Trapani who wrote the ‘Complete Google Wave Guide’ as an ongoing project. And also the programmers we have met at google wave meeting putting a lot of time and money to develop wave tools. No One in google lost their jobs over it.

I am also glad I hadn’t put anything really critical on wave that I was relying on as a long term repository.

Frances Jones

What I appreciated about Wave was that Lars, Jens & co created it in Sydney and I will always admire them as entrepreneurs. Heck, Lars even came to see us speak at the User Group. Many of the nscm crowd got together at Google HQ because of it. It created positives for us.

Google spent I don’t know how many $millions on Wave which Sydney benefitted from. Positives all round for us I’d say.

Tony Hollingsworth

Spot on Frances – the community building and support that occurred remains.

For example, some memories include:
http://gwsug.eventbrite.com/ – the informal user groups where you can see the range of people interested.

http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%23gwsug – we coined the hastag #gwsug for Google Wave Sydney User Group and can enjoy the history via FriendFeed, including the photos of the community.

Finally your teriffic blog posts Frances capturing the initial excitement and promise of Wave:

First impressions of Google Wave, An Australian Perspective
Innovation according to Goovle Wave co-creator Lars Rasmussen

These guys (and many others) really were experienced on wave and their comments, to me at least, say a lot.

What’s page ranking?  It’s one of a number of measures on how easily you can be found on the web, to be taken with a pinch of salt because it depends on what the measurement criteria are (a closely guarded Google secret). But, if you do have a site, a blog, a something on the web, it is nice to know how you’re doing.  Here is one of the Google team, Matt Cutts, on what form part of the 200 signals of measurement.

Google will change their algorithms in order to improve the quality of search we as users experience and to prevent spammers ranking high in search results. This can, however, have an impact on your site because all of a sudden the algorithm changes and your site or post is no longer found so easily.  Again, here is Google’s Matt Cutts on a change in their algorithm in May that resulted in a change to long-tailed searches for sites.

(a long tailed search being a search with a lot of words eg ‘Exceptionally good coffee in Sydney’ versus a short tail: ‘Sydney coffee’)

For more on this one read Timberline Interactive’s post.

because they can.

Here’s how they made it.

Google’s Insights for search compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

Google’s insights for search shows you

• what people are searching for
• where they are searching and when
• and you can spot trends to find out what people are interested in

While we were at the google wave usergroup Pamela gave us a simple ‘Working with Wave Cheatsheet’. There are other guides out there but they seem a bit complicated for some of the simple things I’m trying out – such as a practical way for co-ordinating documents, recording meetings, adding links for everyone.

Pamela is working for Google as a Wave API Developer Advocate, she has a blog and fun stuff. Here’s the handout:

Working with Wave Cheatsheet

Things to do when you’re editing a blip

• Cancel a blip you accidentally just made: ESC
• Add a pic: Drag and drop a photo from your desktop into the blip
• Add links: use the neato link icon in the formatting bar
• Formatting: CTRL – 5 for bullets, CTRL – B, CTRL – I, + other normal formatting keys
• Stop editing: SHIFT-ENTER

Things to do when you are not editing a blip ( you’re in read mode)

• Go to next unread blip: spacebar
• Start editing: Hit CTRL-E or double click and select EDIT
• Add an inline reply: Double click on a world, select REPLY
• Start a new blip: ENTER or CTRL-R

Other neat stuff to think about

• Resize / Minimize / Maximize: Get some control over your WAVE workspace
  • This can be useful for small screens or big waves
  • The URL ‘remembers’ state of the widows, which waves’ selected, search panel query and so on!

• Adding participants
  • You can add someone via the + sign in the wave panel or by drag-and-drop from the Contacts panel
  • You can’t undo (can’t remove participants) for now.

• Saved searches: great for cleaning up your inbox or giving you alternate views
  • SAVE SEARCH button in the middle-bottom wave (eg for participant:jsmith ‘weekly agenda’)

• Folders: Put waves somewhere so they don’t get lost. Just drag and drop, or use the MOVE TO menu

• GAH! GO AWAY! Make use of Archive and Unfollow [mute] – similar to Gmail
  • Archive removes a wave from your inbox until it’s edited or replied to
  • Unfollow removes a wave from your inbox until/unless you re-follow it

• TRASH: it’s your personal trash can.  Throwing a wave away doesn’t affect others view of the wave

• Private replies: great for leaving notes for yourself or having ’side converastions’ with others.
  • By default, you’re the only one who can see a private reply.