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Google Wave Google Wave is a new Google project that combines email, instant messaging and online collaborating. You can’t really describe what it is exactly or all the innovative things that it does without actually seeing it in action. Below is a video from the Google I/O meeting. The video is over an hour long but totally worth watching.

From what I understand, the things shown at I/O are only a sliver of what you’ll be able to do with Google Wave. From the little I’ve seen, this is one of the biggest leaps in communications since wikis and blogging.

Did you know?

Yesterday at the Google I/O Conference, Google launched Web Elements. The widgets allow you “to quickly integrate some of Google’s most popular products, including Calendar, Search, and Maps, directly into their sites with a minimal amount of effort.”

Take a look -

You can quickly copy the html necessary and add it your own website. It’s not fully supported on Google Sites yet, but there’s a workaround until it is.

http://www.google.com/webelements/

Did you know?

You can open and edit your Google Docs in Microsoft Office and then save them back again to Google with this plug-in. For a complete walk-through on how to do this, check out labnol.org.

What does Google’s support of Microformats and RDFa mean?

Google’s recent search update included faceted search (which I wrote about last week) and something called “rich snippets.”

These snippets “[provide] users with a convenient summary of a search result at a glance,” which work well for search listings like reviews, ratings, event information and other forms of small, structured data.

A little more clarification -

The current Web is primarily made up of an enormous number of documents that have been created using HTML. These documents contain significant amounts of structured data, which is largely unavailable to tools and applications. When publishers can express this data more completely, and when tools can read it, a new world of user functionality becomes available, letting users transfer structured data between applications and web sites, and allowing browsing applications to improve the user experience: an event on a web page can be directly imported into a user’s desktop calendar; a license on a document can be detected so that users can be informed of their rights automatically; a photo’s creator, camera setting information, resolution, location and topic can be published as easily as the original photo itself, enabling structured search and sharing.

Google is able to provide this information in their search results by indexing websites that include microformats and RDFa in their site structure. Take for example this book listing from Amazon -

It’s a clean and rich presentation of the important data related to this book; you’ll find the title, the author, the publishing date, a rating and summary. For Google to make use of this data and present it in their search results, the structure on the HTML side needs to look like this -

Similar formatting would be applied to everything from phone numbers, street addresses, postal codes to social networking information (like who’s your friend, co-worker and acquaintance) and might possibly be used by Google to index the things you’re paying attention to (like browsing history, musical preferences, tweets and favorite blogposts).

Yahoo’s Search Monkey as well as other search engines and web services are already doing some of these things but Google’s command of over 70% of the search market means that support of RDFa and microformats will soon be a must for large content providers.

And how does this affect Idealist?

We’ll need to start thinking about which data should be structured this way and which microformats we’ll want to use. Will we allow users to rate organizations, resources and so on? Will search engines have access to microformat information that might be deemed personal (even if the promise not to publish it) or should the user decide?

If you’ve ever heard the term “sematic web,” this is what they’re referring to. Exciting stuff, no?

Did you know?

Google has added an automatic translation feature to Gmail under the Labs setting -

Simply enable “Message Translation” from the Labs tab under Settings, and when you receive an email in a language other than your own, Gmail will help you translate it into a language you can understand. In one click.

If all parties are using Gmail, you can have entire conversations in multiple languages with each participant reading the messages in whatever language is most comfortable for them.

Did you know?

If you haven’t been to Google Sites in a while, you’ll notice that Google has updated the look and functionality to be more consistent with the rest of Google’s online applications.

What’s changed?

Google added hierarchical navigation, changed the layout of the editing functions as well as a number of minor but notable changes, check out the list.

The new changes are subtle but cleaner.

This week Google launched an advanced faceted search feature to help you better navigate your search results.

What this means is that when you search for "pirates" you can dig through the results more effectively. For example, you can search for the type of results you’re looking for, like videos, forums and reviews about pirates.

You can also look for search results based one when they were indexed by Google. I might be looking for the most recent information about pirates so I’d want something within the last 24 hours or maybe I just want all relavant results.

You can also choose to see more images or more text in your results. As it’s currently set, Google shows a mix of images, videos and news in your results. Maybe you want less of that and more text or more photos with out going to the Image Search.

You can ask Google to show you related searches to your query, show you the Wonder Wheel or a timeline.

Related searches will show you a list of user searches that are closest to what you’re looking for.

The Wonder Wheel give you more search options by suggesting searches, much like related searches, that might be close to what you’re looking for. For example, when I was looking for pirates, I really wanted to know more about pirate ships. When I click on pirate ships, it breaks down the search by types of pirate ships.

The timeline search will break the results into dates reflected in the actual content.

Check out the video below for more information.