More than a year ago we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time we committed to maintaining the site at least through the end of 2010. Today we’re sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. So we'd encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature to import all your Waves from Google. This feature will work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.

For more details, please see our help center.

Posted by the Google Wave Team

In August, Google announced that Wave would no longer be developed as a standalone product, but that the Wave technology would survive in other products. Today, I am happy announce the launch of Google Shared Spaces in Google Labs as one of those off-shoots.

A bunch of us who had been working on the Wave APIs were brainstorming about what it would take to just run a Wave gadget. Developers had been doing wonderful stuff --building real-time mini applications--and rather than let that effort go to waste, we wanted to create a new way for people to continue to use these tools and games. Google Shared Spaces is exactly that. A shared space turns a (Wave) gadget into a standalone collaborative application. Just click on the gadget you're interested in to start a new shared space, and then simply send the URL around to share it with your friends and colleagues. You don't need to sign up for a new service - if you have a Google, Twitter or Yahoo account, you're good to go.



Each shared space comes with a chat area (which is just another Wave gadget) for extra interaction. So take Shared Spaces for a spin: Use the Waffle gadget to pick the date for a night out with your friends, annotate a shared map with your favorite places and vote on where to go using any of the polling gadgets. Or if you'd rather stay in, hit the games section and challenge somebody for a good old game of chess. To learn more, check out the quick presentation on our about page.

It's still early, but give it a try and send us feedback through our discussion group.

Posted by Douwe Osinga, Software Engineer, Google Shared Spaces Team

As we announced back in August, we are not continuing active development of Google Wave as a stand-alone product, but have been working hard on the open source Wave in a box project and on making waves accessible through Google Docs.

We wanted to let you know that we will keep wave.google.com running past December 31, 2010 until a suitable replacement to host all your waves is available. In the meantime, you can now use the new export feature to download a zipped version of up to ten waves at a time. Learn more in the Google Wave Help Center.

Additionally, Wave in a Box, the project to make it easy for anyone to host their own wave server, has made significant progress on both functionality and community growth. Just last week, the Apache Software Foundation accepted Wave into its incubator for new projects.

Thanks yet again to all our users for giving Wave a try with your schools, businesses and organizations and to the developers who are working on the next steps for the open source project!

Wave on,

Posted by David Wang, Software Engineer, Google Wave Team

We recently made it possible to export a single wave as a Zip file. Now, you can now also select up to 10 waves in your search panel and download them all together as a set of PDFs.



We hope this feature proves a useful way of saving the information that you have in waves. For more information on it, please visit the help center article.

In addition, we're working on ways for you to access waves through Google Docs and as we announced back in August, we'll continue to keep wave.google.com running at least through the end of the year.

Happy exporting!

Posted by Pat Coleman, Google Wave Team

We're dedicated to giving you better access to the information you currently have in Google's Wave servers. We aim to provide multiple ways to let you export and migrate that information, and we have some updates for you in this blog post.

Today, we're announcing a feature that lets you download your Google Wave content as a Zip file. Within any wave, you can now select "Export" which will let you save your current view of the wave, plus any attachments that have been added along the way. We hope this feature proves a useful way of sharing the information that you have in waves. For more information on it, please visit this help center article.

This feature is useful if you have a few waves that you want to export. We are aiming to have a export method for those that have a lot of waves, and will let you know when that's available.

As we announced back in August, we'll continue to keep wave.google.com running at least through the end of the year. In addition, we're working on ways for you to access waves through Google Docs and we hope to share more on our progress soon.

Lastly, if you are interested in developing on the Wave codebase or running your own Wave server to host your waves, check out our developer blog post about the Wave in a Box project.

Posted by Pat Coleman, Google Wave team

Today we posted an update about our plans for Wave open source code and the federation protocol on our Google Wave Developer blog. The post includes a description of our planned code contributions over the coming months as well as resources for developers to follow the progress of the project and stay involved.

Wave on!

Posted by Soren Lassen, Google Wave Team

Some of you may have seen a post on the official Google blog several weeks ago about some changes to the Wave project, and we wanted to let you know that since then we've been hard at work figuring out all the details of the next steps. We're looking at ways to continue and extend Wave technology in other Google products, open sourcing more of our code and providing support for our loyal users and Apps customers.

While we're still working on plans, we do want to specifically call out that:

• Wave.google.com will be available at least through the end of the year
• There will be ways to export your waves before the end of the year

Thank you for your outpouring of support and kind comments. We're grateful to all the people who have been using Wave and the partners and developers who have built on and improved the technology with us. We look forward to sharing more information with you in the coming weeks.

Posted by Lars Rasmussen, Google Wave team

Over the last few months, I've seen a surprising number of time-related extensions popping up in our gallery - timers, stopwatches, countdowns, and the like. I think it's because 1) many people use Wave to interact with folks from different timezones, and 2) many people use Wave during meetings... and many people don't like meetings to go over time. :)

Whatever the reasons may be, it's a good thing for all of us, as these extensions come in handy in a variety of situations.

For example, the Remaining Time gadget is a favorite of mine. Its simple interface lets you specify an event name and an event time, and then it countdowns to that time.

We first used this gadget in the Google I/O 2010 conference session waves to show the countdown until the start of the talk. We did this because many developers were eager to watch the live notes for a session from afar, but they couldn't easily convert from the San Francisco time listed into their own local time. By including a countdown, they could look at the remaining time and instantly know when to return to the wave.

More recently, in our local Google DevFest AU conference, I used the gadget to let speakers know how much time they have left to present. I set up a laptop in front of the speakers, created a wave with the gadget in it,and set it to countdown until the end of their talk. By using a wave instead of a desktop app, I could modify the wave from my comfortable seat in the back if I wanted to give them more time or send them a message.

Besides the "remaining time" gadget, you might also check out these time-related extensions:

• Time-me: Gives you all the basic functionality of a stopwatch - start, stop, and split, but since it's in Wave, anyone can do those actions, and it shows the usernames for each split.

• Time-Manager: Lets you start and stop counting time, and shows the total time counted. The developer created it because he loves the similar functionality in Basecamp ® for tracking the amount of time spent on tasks and wanted to bring that to Wave.

• Local time gadget: Lets you specify a time in your locale and converts that time to the local time of whoever's viewing it. It was created by a gamer in the US who schedules gaming sessions for him and his friends in wave, and he wanted to make it easy for them to see the local time for each session.

• Deadline gadget: Similar to the gadget I described above, this one lets you specify a end time and shows the remaining days, hours, and minutes. This one is designed specifically for visualizing task deadlines, like when a blog post should be completed, and lets you check off the task when done.

Wave on!

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations, Google Wave Team

Today on the Google Enterprise blog, we announced that we're beginning to roll out user policy management, which will allow Google Apps Premier and Education Edition customers to customize which users in their domains have access to each application in the suite.

One of the top-requested features from businesses and schools who want to try out Google Wave is the ability to pilot the application with a subset of users. With this new feature, Google Apps admins can now start by enabling Wave for a group of advance testers. For example, at a K-12 school, admins can now enable the service for just teachers and older students, or a large enterprise can turn it on for a specific project group first.



If you're already a Google Apps Premier or Education Edition admin, you'll start seeing the 'Organizations & users' tab in the control panel over the next week. And to learn more about Google Wave for your domain, visit http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/wave.html.

Wave on!

Posted by Greg D'Alesandre, Product Manager, Google Wave Team

Just before the December holidays, a few Google Wave team members were playing foosball and decided we needed to do something fun together. Since Australia is a bit warm that time of year, we figured why not go to Antarctica? Time was short, so we had to get our plan together quickly. From using Wave at work, we had found that it is great for coordinating with small groups of people, so naturally, we decided to use it to plan our trip. We needed to find a cruise, decide on a date, figure out who wanted to go, work out cabin arrangements, get some flights, equipment, camera gear, and try not to get seasick. All in just in three weeks!

First, we had to decide which cruise to take, so we started a planning wave. Greg began by itemising upcoming cruises from a couple of potential operators, listing out dates, routes, and activities. Many of us were keen to kayak in the icy Antarctic waters, so we eventually settled on an eleven-day cruise with a provider from Canada.

Next, we managed the tricky task of choosing sleeping arrangements with a poll gadget in our planning wave. Each person indicated their cabin type preferences, and luckily, a single arrangement fell out of those choices. You can see our votes in the wave (try 'Playback' to see how the discussion evolved).

Then we began the ever-popular tasks of booking flights and accomodation and sorting out what to bring. We decided to divide up the responsibility: Narelle and Alex researched flights, Pat called Argentinian hotels, and Jan looked into the administrivia of visas, immunisations, and equipment (cameras!). Greg ... supervised.

Whenever someone found new information, he or she summarised it in our wave and we discussed the options right there, as a group. Within a day or two our arrangements were complete, and earlier discussions in the wave were replaced with final information such as flight numbers, booking numbers and costs.


A great advantage of planning everything in Google Wave is that the wave always presents a definitive view of the latest information and decisions. It didn't matter if some people missed parts of the discussion, because they could use playback to easily catch up with the decisions or see how the discussion evolved. Once a decision was made, we deleted the discussion and replaced it with the final plan. This meant the wave only displayed the most up-to-date, important information.

If we hadn't used Google Wave, we might have been able to pull the trip together in time, but we're not sure we would have still liked eachother enough to actually enjoy our time trapped on a boat together. Wave helped us pull all our information together into one place, make decisions quickly, and have a record of those decisions for when someone changed their mind. So the next time you want to get out and explore the world with a few friends, (or even colleagues!), give Wave a try.


You can check out some of our photos from the trip. Oh, and we figured as long we were standing on the southernmost continent, we should film Dr. Wave in his unnatural habitat. In fact this was an excuse to put him on the edge of a cliff and throw snowballs at him. Enjoy!

And here's a re-enactment of the wave we used to plan the trip:

Posted by Alex, Jan, Pat, Narelle and Greg, Google Wave Team

Over the course of the last week, we held 5 days of mini-conferences on different Google developer technologies in the Google Sydney office. Since some developers couldn't get time off work (or life :)) to come to the event in person, I wanted to make it possible for them to participate virtually.

So, I setup a Ustream channel for the event, powered by a sleuth webcam in the front row of the audience, and also set up a backchannel discussion wave for each day of the event. Both the Ustream video player and Google Wave are embeddable, so I could combine the two on the same page - like this one for the Chrome & OpenWeb day. To make that page, I just grabbed the embed code on the UStream channel page, generated the embed code from the Wave Web element page -- enabling the header/footer options to make the "Next unread message" button visible -- and pasted them into a simple HTML page.



The great thing about using an embedded wave is that some folks (the virtual ones) can interact with it via the Ustream page, and other folks (the live audience members) can do the same by logging into their Google Wave account. Using a wave also meant we could easily have multiple conversations at the same time and pull in multimedia, like when I used the HTML gadget to play around with the HTML elements on the slides.

To try it for your next conference, class or virtual get together, follow these step-by-step instructions:

1. Visit the channel page, like http://www.ustream.tv/channel/devfest-au

2. Click "embed codes" on the top right of the video player.

3. Copy the "Live show" code.

4. Paste it into an HTML webpage.

5. Visit the wave. Copy the URL in the browser bar or in the "Link to this page" dialog.

6. Visit the Wave web element page (http://www.google.com/webelements/wave/). Paste the URL into that page.

7. Copy the generated code into your HTML page.

8. To align the wave next to the ustream, like in my example, wrap both of them in a div with style "float:left".

.. enjoy the live-ness!


Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations, Google Wave Team

In Google Wave, waves from which all participants have been removed are wiped from Google's servers permanently.

To be more specific: When you are removed from a wave that you have seen before, whether you remove yourself or someone else removes you, you are given a chance to acknowledge that you are OK being removed. At the top of such waves, there is a button that says "Delete my copy". Until you click this button, you keep a copy of the wave up until the point you've been removed.



You can keep that copy forever. We delete only waves where all participants have been removed, and none are keeping a copy.

Currently, "Delete my copy" does the same as moving the wave to trash, but this may change in the future. Previous releases of Google Wave did not have the "Delete my copy" button; moving to trash was the only way to delete your copy.

If you have questions, please visit our Help Forum.

Posted by Paul Korzhyk, Software Engineer Google Wave Team

Today we're announcing Google Wave Football Fever: a way to help you stay on top of the matches in South Africa, predict the outcomes and organize viewing parties with your friends.

My first experience following the tournament was back in 1994 when the information technology wasn't as advanced as it is these days. For weeks, practically all I did was stay up late, get up early, tune in to the TV day in and out, and wait anxiously for the newspaper to arrive in the morning just to get the latest scores, news, or highlights. Oh boy, what a fun life!

Nowadays, however, such information is delivered to us more conveniently on the internet, but so much of the fun is still getting together with other people to discuss and debate the games, both in person, and virtually. So we designed a set of templates for Wave to help you do both.

Visit our main Football Fever page. From there for each match of the tournament you can:

• Predict the game: Start a new wave where you and your friends can make predictions on the final outcome, the top player, and add your own custom polls. Once the match is completed, the prediction gadget will show the final outcome, and who came closest. Hey, who knows - maybe you have a hidden talent as a sports analyst!

• Plan a viewing party: Of course, these events aren't complete without fun hang-out times with your friends. Start a new wave where you and your friends can organize a gathering to watch a game together or an after party to celebrate your winning team.
• Get live commentary: Both the prediction and viewing party waves display live updates from Google News and Twitter. So, you won't miss a moment when Wayne Rooney scores a goal, and you'll see what the fans out there are saying about it!

To add some extra football love, why not show your team spirit in Wave with a fan-flavored avatar? Check out the football-themed Picnik effects and then update your photo.

And if you need any help, just visit our Help Forum.

See you in South Africa!

Posted by Marcel Prasetya, Software Engineer and Brasil fan, Google Wave Team

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

Earlier today, we posted about our first birthday on the Official Google blog.

Here on our team blog, we wanted to add a big "THANK YOU!" to all of the developers, students, teachers, journalists, screenwriters, video producers, analysts, entrepreneurs, robot builders, musicians, dentists, gamers, community organizers, veterinarians, hotel managers, engineers and everyone else who have been using Google Wave and sharing feedback and stories to help us continue building and improving the product, platform and protocol.

Here's to you!

Wave on!

Posted by Anna-Christina Douglas, Product Marketing, Google Wave Team

Starting today, we are making Google Wave openly available to everyone as part of Google Labs. You no longer need an invitation to wave -- simply visit wave.google.com and sign right in. Likewise, if you are a Google Apps administrator at a business, school or organization, you can now easily enable Google Wave for all your users at no extra cost (more on our Enterprise blog).

We began previewing Google Wave with individuals and a handful of Google Apps customers six months ago. Since then, Wave has been used in a great many interesting ways. It's clear from the invaluable feedback we've received that Wave is a great place to get work done, in particular for teams working together on projects that involve lots of discussion and close coordination. Here are a few examples:

Business: Co-workers at companies large and small are using Wave, from writing software code at Lyn and Line and coordinating ad campaigns at Clear Channel Radio, to international project communications for Deloitte's As One project.

Education: University students and professors worldwide have used waves within and beyond the classroom to collaborate on Latin poetry translations, write academic research papers and even build new functionality with Wave's APIs. An ICT teacher also enjoyed having her 5th-graders do their class research in Wave.

Creative collaboration: From virtual art classes to writing the Complete Guide to Google Wave itself, waves make it easier for groups to review and critique multimedia content like images and videos. (We've heard that Wave is fun for gaming, too.)

Organizations and conferences: The Debatewise Global Youth panel explored climate change across 100 countries and waves at eComm (Emerging Communication Conference), LCA 2010 conference and HASTAC 2010 helped track speaking sessions. We are using waves in the same manner at today's Google I/O conference.

Journalism: Mashable used Wave to interview journalists on the future of journalism, and The Seattle Times experimented with a public Wave to develop their Pulitzer Prize-winning news coverage.

And here's a brief video to illustrate how groups can work together in Wave:

If you tried Google Wave out a while ago, and found it not quite ready for real use, now is a good time to come back for a second try. Wave is much faster and much more stable than when we began the preview, and we have worked hard to make Wave easier to use. For example, you can now get email notifications when waves change, easily navigate to unread parts of a wave, and remove participants added by mistake. We have also added permission management options and an extensions gallery.

Today, we are also launching several improvements to the Wave APIs and open sourcing additional components for developers building their own Wave services. Read more about these updates on our developer blog.

Wave on!

Posted by Stephanie Hannon, Product Manager, Google Wave Team

Since our introductory blogpost about the extension gallery, we've been thrilled by all of the useful and interesting Google Wave extensions coming out of the developer community. With every enhancement we announce, developers find inventive ways to create handy extensions.

Accordingly, the number of extensions is growing, and we would like to introduce a few improvements we've made to make it easier to discover, browse, and sample extensions for yourself.

Starting at the top, you will notice we replaced the previous Extensions link with a dedicated Extensions section. This section lets you check out "Featured" extensions that our team would like to highlight -- the Wave team occasionally selects these extensions because we think they're particularly useful, user-friendly and "Wave-y." You can also browse many other extensions in our gallery via the "All" link.

We also overhauled the gallery view itself, allowing you to see each extension's icon and description, at a glance

Additionally, we've made it easier to start using an extension. If you see a particular extension you like and want to quickly take it for a spin, you can simply "Try It Now" -- even without installing it. If you like it and want to use it later, just go back in your browser and click "Install." Please note that not all extensions support this feature at the moment, but we hope more will add this option in the near future.



We hope you find these improvements useful as we work towards providing a first-class extension experience within Google Wave. Stay tuned for more advancements in the future. If you're a developer, you can get started building extensions and then submit them for the gallery.


Posted by David Byttow, Software Engineer, Google Wave Team

Right now, there are a handful of Google Wave gadgets designed to help you bring information from other sites into a wave and interact with that content collaboratively. It will be a wonderful day when every website can be wave-ified inside a Google Wave gadget, but until then, I want to share a simple method for embedding arbitrary webpages inside a wave- a new third party extension called the Iframe Gadget. When you insert this gadget, you (and anyone else in the wave) can specify the URL of a webpage, and the gadget will render that site right inside the wave. It works best with webpages that provide an embed code, like Google Maps, and fill all the available screen space.

For example, let's say you want to embed your team's calendar on a wave. First, follow the instructions in the Google Calendar Help Center to find the Iframe code for embedding the calendar. Then, copy the URL out of that code and specify it in the Iframe gadget. Presto, calendar-o!

Basically, any time a site gives you a snippet of code that includes "< iframe >", you can retrieve the URL and use it with the Iframe gadget. Here's another example of how to embed a Google presentation in a wave. First, click "Share->Publish" on the presentation, then copy the URL from the Iframe code there and paste that into the Iframe gadget, making sure it's tall enough to show the controls.


Even if the site doesn't give you an Iframe embed code, you can still try embedding the page URL and see how it looks.

To get started with the IFrame gadget, sign into Google Wave and install it from here.

Additionally, if a site gives you a snippet of code that uses an "<embed>" or "<script>" tag (equating to a Flash or JavaScript widget), you can use the HTML gadget, by the same author, to embed that site in a wave. To try that one out, install it from here.

We hope this helps you integrate more content into Google Wave.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations, Google Wave Team

One of the more glaringly obvious missing features over Google Wave's short public life has been the ability to remove participants from waves. It has several obvious benefits:

• Removing someone who you accidentally added
• Removing yourself from a wave that's no longer interesting
• Removing someone who's not participating in good spirit or at all
• Removing another person as a courtesy when the wave is no longer relevant to them

We knew this would not just be as simple as eliminating a user abruptly from a conversation. For instance, if you removed your friend as a courtesy, she should still be able to access to the content she has already seen.

Furthermore, the interaction between private replies and the larger wave conversation is interesting. Should you keep participating in a private reply even though you've been removed from the main conversation? How about if you've never seen the main conversation?

Answering these questions is a lot tougher than it may seem at first glance -- particularly considering Google Wave's unique liveness, where every action has an immediate consequence that's visible to all participants on a wave. Designing a scalable infrastructure for this proved challenging, at times confounding, and ultimately very rewarding.

Our coolest innovation in my opinion is what we think of as the It-Never-Happened scenario. Imagine this: after a rough day at work, you spend the night out with friends and return home to write a less-than-flattering message to, say, your boss. At 6am you wake up and realize what you've done to your implacable horror! Alas, with email and other forms of communication, you'd be out of luck, and perhaps spend all morning inventing clever excuses about how your computer was taken over by crafty hackers. With a wave however, you simply remove your boss as a participant, and when she wakes up at 7am to check her messages, the wave is gone from her inbox. As long as she didn't open the wave before you removed her, she will never see it. Cool!


But what if she had already opened the wave by the time you removed her from it? Well, consider a different scenario: someone adds you to a wave promising they'll fetch the water if you'll whitewash their fence. You open the wave, agree to the proposition, and proceed with the whitewashing. Yards of fence later, that someone removes you from the wave. You certainly would want to have a record of the deal ('It totally happened')! Since you had opened the wave before you were removed from it, you retain a read-only copy of the wave up to the time you were removed. You can still play back the wave, but you won't see future changes or be able to make further contributions.



We carefully designed the feature so neither the person who removed you, nor others on the wave can see whether or not you have opened the wave. They can only tell you have been removed and that you no longer see changes to the wave (unless, of course, someone adds you back).

Finally, you also have the option to remove yourself from a wave. We've all been added to conversation threads that turned out to be unimportant or uninteresting. With email you have to ask someone else to take you off the thread, or set up a filter to stop those messages from appearing in your inbox. Now in Wave, when your friend adds you to a wave about the dinner party he's having the same weekend that you're out of town for business, you can simply remove yourself from the wave and you won't have a constant reminder of all the fun you'll be missing.

We hope the considerable amount of effort we've put into designing and building this feature increases your productivity and ability to organize and share waves the way you want.

Wave on!

Posted by Dhanji R. Prasanna, Software Engineer, Google Wave team

This is a guest post from Cory Haik, Assistant Managing Editor, Seattletimes.com.

On April 12, 2010, it was announced The Seattle Times was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for coverage of the tragic slayings of four Lakewood, Wash., police officers on November 29, 2009. That honor recognized the work of the entire newsroom and the award goes to the whole staff. I'd like to extend that just a bit.

As a Web journalist, it's all about choosing the right tools wisely. Sometimes those tools are the tried and true. Like a notebook and pen. Shoe-leather, feet-on-the-street reporting should never be taken for granted or displaced by shiny new products. But sometimes, well, it's all about the beta, baby. Like going live from an iPhone with the Ustream broadcaster app. Or like a Twitter hashtag stream on your homepage. Or like Google Wave.

Below is an excerpt from the quick piece I wrote for seattletimes.com the day after the manhunt for the shooting suspect was over. It describes some of the social-tool uses which were a critical part of the online breaking news coverage of this traumatic community event. Using Google Wave was something we thought of in the moment -- and in the middle of a breaking story that already included several social media elements.

Seattletimes.com decided at the height of the story to engage with local citizenry and others through a social media experiment. Google Wave, described by Google as, "an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration," became a live document that allowed folks on the web interested in the story to take part in helping move it forward. It was social media, reporting and online journalism at the next level. At least, a crack at it.

Some elements of the wave included links to police scanner audio, live video, information about road closures, school lockdowns, suspect information and more. A manhunt map was created inside the wave and updated by participants. And a map was linked inside the wave that seattletimes.com then used on the site. It was useful to producers updating the site because they could put information out and get tips back, instantly. We then could pass the tips on to the Metro desk and follow along that way. It was like using Twitter with a real-time response and rich content.

Despite the fact that we reached fewer than 500 people and encountered a couple of technical glitches, I'd like to think that using Google Wave was successful. And if the No. 1 rule of social media -- or at least my No. 1 rule of social media -- is that using it as it's useful to you is the rule, then I am quite confident it was.

Thanks to the folks at Google Wave for giving me this place to post. And here's where I'd like to extend the breaking news award to all the users that read and engaged with our site, to all the @seattletimes followers and especially to the folks that jumped into our Google Wave experiment (PDF of the wave). It was picking up one of the right tools for this breaking news coverage. And that's the key to serving the story and serving the user-- the two most important things.

Posted by Cory Tobert Haik, Assistant Managing Editor, seattletimes.com