Google Wave Borrows from Twitter, Adds 'Follow' Feature

Google's eagerly anticipated communications service Wave has opened to a lot more people for about a month now. Unfortunately, many users were unimpressed with the current state of the service, be it because of its rather clunky interface or simply because they just don't get what problem exactly it is trying to solve. But don't give up on it just yet, Google has big plans for Wave and has now made a few changes and added a new “follow” feature to address some of the issues raised by the users.

“We've received lots of feedback from Wavers that the public waves they read were clogging up their inboxes. Today, we've introduced a new concept to Google Wave--"following" waves. Now, clicking on a public wave no longer causes it to appear (and stay) in your inbox; you have to explicitly choose to "follow" the wave,” Casey Whitelaw, engineering tech lead for Google Wave, wrote.

The feature is easy enough to understand especially if you're familiar with the Twitter concept of “following.” And if you're interested in Wave, you probably are. Until now, any public Wave you visited would stick around in your inbox, regardless of you being interested in it or not. This unnecessarily clogged up the already, rather busy Inbox.

Now when someone adds you to a wave or you get involved in one, Wave will automatically follow it. You can also decide to manually follow a wave that you find interesting. This way, every time there is an update, you will get notified in the Inbox. You can then remove it from the inbox using the new “Archive” button, which works exactly as in Gmail, but any new update will bring it back.

If you decide you are no longer interested in a Wave, you can completely remove it by using “Unfollow.” The function also replaces the Mute feature as it became redundant. You can then follow back a wave at any point, and unfollowed waves are still accessible by searching for them, they just don't show up in the Inbox anymore. “Following is the first step towards a set of new tools for managing waves in your inbox. In the future, there will be more control over what kinds of changes will cause a wave to appear in your inbox, and we will soon introduce better support for groups of wave users,” Whitelaw added.