Wave This!

Google Wave is a great tool to collaborate with a small group of people and to share and discuss information from the web with your friends. However, to get interesting information from the web into a wave you have to use old school copy and paste. Until now! Today we're announcing WaveThis, a set of easy ways to create a discussion in a wave directly from the site you want to share.

Look to the right of this blog post. You'll see a "WaveThis" button that lets the visitors to this blog (that's you!) easily discuss this blog post with their friends and coworkers in a small group. It's less public than broadcast tools and more interactive than using email. When you click the "WaveThis" button, it will copy the title and URL of this post and drop it in a new wave. Then, you can add your friends to the wave to start discussing. Try it out!

Of course you will come across stuff on the web that you want to discuss in a wave where there isn't a WaveThis button ready for you to click. To help with that, we've created a WaveThis bookmarklet and a Chrome extension. To use the bookmarklet, drag the link below to your bookmarks in Firefox, Safari or Chrome.

WaveThis bookmarklet

After that, any time you see something interesting on the web you want to discuss, just select the text that drew your eye, click that bookmark and presto! you have a new wave! The Chrome extension works the same way. To get it, just visit the WaveThis extension from your Google Chrome browser and press 'Install.'

If you are a webmaster, you can now craft a URL that, if followed, automatically creates a new wave with a specific title and content, like this:

https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?u=http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/06/wave-this.html&t=Wave+This&c=Awesome+new+service

Now, a wave wouldn't be a wave if all you could do was copy over some plain old text. Websites that want to incorporate some interactivity into the resulting waves can specify a helper gadget. For example, a WaveThis link to a YouTube video looks like this:

http://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?g=http://wave-this.appspot.com/public/youtube.xml&u=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDu2A3WzQpo&t=Look+at+this+video

The wave that is created has the video embedded so that your friends know what you're talking about, like this:

Learn more about adding WaveThis to your website at http://code.google.com/apis/wave/wavethis/.

Wave away!

Posted by Douwe Osinga, Software Engineer, Google Wave Team