Google Wave Gets Read-Only Participants, Restore Feature

Google Wave may not be the hottest thing in the tech world at the moment after a slightly disappointing wider roll-out, but that may be a good thing as the team can now focus on improving the service for the users that matter, the ones that actually have a use for Wave rather than treat it like the latest novelty item and expect it to fix all their communication problems and maybe give out candy in the process as well. Now, the dev team has implemented a couple of badly needed new features which should make Wave management a much simpler task.

First up, Read-Only Participants, a new feature which doesn't really need much of an explanation. It enables Wave creators to set the permission level for participants, making it possible to add new users to a Wave without allowing them to make any edits to it. They will be able to view the contents of the Wave and playback the history, but can't make any changes to it or add any new participants as well. Entire groups can be made 'read-only' including the public one, meaning that the Wave will be viewable by anyone but editable by only a few.

The second feature is equally useful. Restore from Playback allows users with full-access to a wave to restore it to any previous state recorded in the history. This is useful when the conversation goes off track or when correcting inadvertent mistakes. With the two features, wave creators have much more control over their waves and other tools are coming soon which should also help in this regard.

"These two simple features are only the beginning of a set of things on our drawing board aimed at giving users better control over waves they create. For example, we're planning to introduce a third access setting -- 'Reply-only' -- that would let users add new blips, but prevent them from editing blips they did not create. We're also re-designing the interface to let you change permissions for several participants more easily," Narelle Cozens, a software engineer on Google Wave Team concluded.