Google has added weather data to its Google Earth application. As of now, the new feature only supports locations in North America and parts of Europe.

<It was one year ago at Google I/O that company unveiled one of its most ambitious projects to date: Google Wave. Sadly, ambition doesn’t always equal success. In fact, you might say Google Wave was too ambitious. It was promising to be too many things — it needed focus. And it needed polish. Now, all this time later, Google believes it finally has both. Today, Google is announcing that Wave will be open to everyone. This includes not only consumers with Google accounts, but also Google Apps customers. The project is now a part of Google Labs, where it will remain as work continues on it. But much work has already been done — if you haven’t tried it in the past few months, now is probably a good time to revisit it, as is it much more stable and faster than it was in the past. And it’s full of some new features that should make it more obvious what it can be useful for. You may recall this video from last year showcasing Google Wave on stage at Google I/O — it got over 9 million views and had people clamoring for the exclusive invites. But the video failed to answer perhaps the fundamental question, “what do we do with it right now?,” developer Lars Rasmussen tells us. ”That’s because we weren’t sure,” he admits. People would load it up and get overwhelmed or confused. “But we know that now — it’s about groups of people adopting Wave,” he says. Over the past year of watching usage, Rasmussen’s team concluded that the “sweet spot” for Wave is group collaboration. While these days, most sexy new services are some variety of social network where people share things, Wave is about “people getting together to get work done,” he says. And that’s the market Wave now intends to go squarely after. Google is known for shipping projects early and letting them evolve as people test them out. But the company acknowledged from day one that Wave was being put out there early even by Google standards. The intention was to see how people would use it. While that may make it sound like everything has been going according to plan, that hasn’t been the perception. I asked Rasmussen if looking back now, he felt it was a mistake to release Wave the way they did. Rasmussen admits that Google wasn’t expecting as big of an initial reaction as they got. This was followed by a huge amount of backlash (which Rasmussen gave me props for predicting, which I appreciate). It’s been a bumpy ride. But again, he says they’ve learned a lot from the past year. And the team believes that Wave will follow the Gartner Hype Cycle — we had the Peak of Inflated Expectations, followed by the Trough of Disillusionment. Now we’re ready for the Slope of Enlightenment, if the theory holds.

Wave has about a million active users now, Rasmussen says (not to be confused with the numbers from December when one million Wave invites had been sent out). While this compares favorably with another year-old service with a lot of hype, Foursquare, Wave had the benefit of Google backing it, so a million may seem low. But Wave also didn’t get the kind of piggyback Google Buzz did when Google launched it inside of Gmail — a service with nearly 200 million users. I asked the Wave team if they’d like to see some sort of similar placement for Wave in the future. “We’d be very happy if that happened,” Wave developer Stephanie Hannon says. She notes that Gmail Labs experiment may be perfect for something like that. It’s something Google and the Wave team is thinking about, Rasmussen confirms. When I asked if they thought Buzz was stepping on their toes in some regard, Rasmussen said that while there is some overlap, the services are quickly proving to be two different things. Buzz is about sharing with a lot of people, while Wave is about realtime collaboration with a smaller group of people, he says. I also asked Rasmussen about his thoughts on the state of HTML5, since Wave is one of the key big projects hoping to utilize some of the newer web features. “You’ll never hear me say I’m happy with the pace of HTML5 development,” Rasmussen says with a laugh. That said, the Wave team remains completely committed to the web, and thinks their technology needs could help push it forward even faster. Mobile usage/development has been a weakness for Wave right now, according to Rasmussen. But he hopes that will changes soon with the launch of several new APIs — another part of Wave’s Google I/O announcement today. It will be interesting to see how Wave fares in year two, with less hype and more functionality. If the team is able to get it into Gmail or Google Docs, they’ll get their chance to prove whether it’s the ultimate collaboration tool or not. And remember, almost all of this has been talk about Wave the product — the belief has always been that Wave the platform would be much more important. But the truth is that it’s hard to built a platform people will use without a product. So Wave better hope that this is indeed the Slope of Enlightenment.

CrunchBase InformationGoogle WaveInformation provided by CrunchBase

Once you're active in Google Wave, you want to know when something new happens there—even if you don't have Wave open in your browser. These notifier tools monitor your Wave inbox, letting you know you've got new and changed waves. The following is an excerpt from the all-new Chapter 9 of The Complete Guide to Google Wave. Got feedback? Let me know in the comments and help write the first book on Wave! Google Wave Add-on for Firefox If you use Mozilla's popular web browser, Firefox, the Google Wave Add-on puts a Wave icon on the status bar at the bottom of your browser window. That icon displays alerts when you've got new, unread waves and keeps a running total of how many unread changes you've got in your inbox. Click on the icon to open Wave in a new tab for quick access. Set your Wave login information in the extensions's Options dialog, as shown in Figure 9-1.

Figure 9-1. The Google Wave Add-on for Firefox adds a Wave icon on the status bar of your web browser, which displays the number of unread and changed waves in your inbox. Download the Google Wave Add-on for Firefox at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/14973. As of writing, the extension is listed as "experimental," which means it hasn't been reviewed by the Mozilla Add-ons editors. Check the box next to "Let me install this experimental add-on" to download and install it in your copy of Firefox. Googsystray for Windows and Linux If you'd rather get Wave notifications outside of your browser, Googsystray is a system tray utility for Windows and Linux that plays a sound when new waves arrive and displays unread wave notifications in the corner of your screen, as shown in Figure 9-2.

Figure 9-2. Googsystray plays an alert sound and displays a notification of new and changed waves in your system tray. Click a Wave notification to open the unread wave directly in your browser. Googsystray is particularly useful if you're an all-around Google lover, as it also offers Gmail, Google Voice, Google Calendar, and Google Reader notifications. Download Googsystray for free from http://googsystray.sourceforge.net/. Google Wave Notifier for Windows Don't need all the bells, whistles, and multi-service support of Googsystray? The aptly named Google Wave Notifier is a Windows system tray utility that, like the others, alerts you of new and changed waves with unread content in a pop-up box and icon, as shown in Figure 9-3.

Figure 9-3. The Google Wave Notifier adds a Wave icon in the Windows system tray that displays the total number of new and unread waves in your inbox. Like Googsystray, you can click on an alert to open the new wave directly. Download the Google Wave Notifier for free from http://wave-notify.sourceforge.net/. Waveboard with Growl Notifications for Mac OS X Mac users who want Wave notifications should try Waveboard. Waveboard is a free, standalone Wave client that adds a Waveboard icon with your total of unread waves on Mac OS X's menu bar and Dock. Waveboard also provides pop-up Growl notifications, as shown in Figure 9-4.

Figure 9-4. Waveboard for Mac OS X displays an icon with the total of unread waves on the menu bar and Dock, as well as Growl notifications. To get Growl notifications with Waveboard, download and install Growl for your Mac from http://growl.info/. Waveboard is also a free download from http://www.getwaveboard.com/. XMPP Lite for Google Talk and AIM Unlike the other notifier apps and add-ons listed here, the XMPP Lite bot is a solution that you put to work directly inside the specific waves you want to receive updates from. If you add the XMPP Lite bot to a wave and then click the subscribe button in the blip it adds, you'll receive IM updates when that wave changes.

Figure 9-5. The XMPP Lite bot adds a blip with a Subscribe and Unsubscribe button to a wave. Click the Subscribe button to opt into instant messenger notifications of wave activity. Gotcha: While all the other notifiers mentioned here let you know if you have ANY changed or unread waves in your inbox at all, XMPP Lite only notifies you about the specific waves you've added it to, and pressed the Subscribe button in. XMPP Lite is one of this book's featured bots. For details on how to use it, head back to the "XMPP Lite (

)" section in Chapter 8.

Like the rest of the book, this was co-written by Adam Pash and myself (in this section, mostly Adam, bless his soul). We're working furiously on getting The Complete Guide to Google Wave's first edition—a step up from the Preview PDF—ready for print publication. What should we include or exclude? Let us know in the comments, and thanks in advance.

Windows only: Google Wave has a lot of potential, but it's also another inbox to keep track of. Google Wave Desktop Notifier is a small system tray application will let you know when you've got new messages in your inbox. We've featured a Google Wave notifier before in the form of a Firefox extension, but if you prefer a non-browser alternative, Wave Desktop Notifier will do the trick. This handy little program gives you some pretty detailed notifications when you receive new waves—it checks your inbox every two minutes, and then shows you your last received reply in a notification (as well as how many unread waves you currently have in your inbox). In addition, you can access your 5 latest unread waves from the system tray icon, or just navigate directly to your inbox. I'd love to see it give the option of using Growl for Windows instead of its own dedicated notifications, but it's certainly a great addition to any Wave user's system tray. Google Wave Notifier is a free download, Windows only. Google Wave Notifier [via Life Rocks 2.0]

What is it with architects that they feel the need to glom onto the latest buzzwords to justify their projects? A group from M.I.T.’s Senseable City Lab is looking for funding for an ambitious observation deck designed for the 2012 London Olympics. They are calling it the Cloud. It is a “lightweight transparent tower, composed of a ‘cloud’ of inflatable, light-emitting spheres . . . fed by real time information from all over the world.” The structure is an architectural interpretation of the realtime cloud. Videos of the Olympic events, Twitter and Facebook streams, and other realtime data such as energy usage, Internet traffic, and mobile phone activity will be projected onto LED displays in the Cloud so that people in the Cloud can observe the events from high above London. M.I.T. credits Google and the engineering firm Arup as part of the design team. Fiction author Umberto Eco is an adviser. In other words, it’s never going to be built. Not by 2012. They don’t even have building permits yet. The drawings are nice though. Except I’m not sure what that person is doing inside one of those spheres in the bottom image. Is that some sort of realtime cage?  He looks like he needs saving.

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Gadgets and robots for Google Wave

Bryan was kind enough to send me an invitation to Google Wave, and I’ve been trying it out for the past two weeks. Unfortunately, I don’t get to send invitations unlike those people who got their accounts directly from Google. It is quite lonely to have a Google Wave account but only a few people to wave with. But I like what I’ve seen so far, even if I encounter bugs every so often. Bryan created this game gadget called Pick-up Sticks, and I find myself refreshing the game each time I get stuck with whatever I’m doing. It get’s exciting if a lot of people are playing it simultaneously. We played it so much, we ended up getting “wavelet too large” errors. Aw. Another side effect of trying out Google Wave: I now find regular chat to be too slow. Seeing the character-by-character edits can really make things a lot faster, because sometimes I can already figure out what the other party is thinking even before he/she finishes typing the message. Some people might be too conscious with their spelling, but I don’t mind at all. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived in a country where they don’t speak English that well.
I discovered that Google Wave works best with Google Chrome. (Geez, I wonder why?) I find it too slow with Firefox, and it really gets on my nerves when I tried opening those huge public waves. My friend uses Safari, and she had problems with loading the Pick-up Sticks gadget. Forget Internet Explorer, even the Google Wave Team gave up on that one. I can’t wait to start using Google Wave for collaboration. But to do that, first my adviser has to get a Google Wave account. :p Also, I need true LaTeX integration. By “true” LaTeX integration, I mean that we would type in the wave just like how we usually begin our LaTeX documents, and there’s a gadget or a robot that allows us to see a preview of our code. I wonder if this is possible? So far, all that Google Wave can do is to replace the equations encoded in LaTeX with images (via the robot Watexy). Preview of the Watexy robot. You have to add it as a contact to make it work. And since it is a lot more fun to test Google Wave instead of doing work, I am now trying the Wordpress plugin Wavr. So here is a test wave embedded in Wordpress:

Happy waving!

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Windows/Mac/Linux (Adobe AIR): Waver allows you to keep a single-column view of Google Wave open on your desktop at all times from which you can read, compose, and keep an eye on what's happening in your Wave inbox. We've featured ways to keep on top of your Wave inbox before, but if you're not the type to keep things open in your browser (or you don't use Firefox), free Wave client Waver is a decent alternative. The client is merely a standalone version of Google Wave's mobile interface, but it works perfectly as a compact, out-of-the-way client. You can view your inbox, search for waves, view them, reply to them, create new ones and even manage your Wave contacts, all from inside the app. Waver isn't the only Site-Specific Browser (SSB) to integrate with Wave. For those that want a full, multi-column Wave-focused client, free app Waveboard aims to tightly integrate Wave with OS X, adding, for example, support for Growl notifications. Waver is a free download for all platforms, and requires Adobe AIR. Waver [via Life Rocks 2.0]

I'll use this plugin... someday...

A surprise discovery when I tried to change the proxy settings in Google Chrome. WTF?!

Your experiment in blogging has really taken off, so you're itching to move from Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress installation. Luckily, you can do so without losing the traffic you worked so hard to build. The last thing you want, when moving your blog to a new home, is to tank your Google ranking and traffic flow. At Digital Inspiration, they've put together a step by step guide to transplanting your Blogger-based and hosted blog to a self-hosted WordPress installation—without leaving your rank and traffic behind. This quick video explains the process: The video covers all of the steps, but if you're going to be transplanting your blog, we'd suggest visiting Digital Inspiration and reviewing the detailed step by step instructions to make sure you don't miss anything critical. Have experience moving blogs to new hosts and platforms? Sound off in the comments with your tips, warning, and horror stories. Migrate from Blogger to WordPress without Losing your Google Search Rankings [Digital Inspiration]

How to enable/disable JavaScript in Google Chrome