The important thing then, becomes that just like email, when a wave you are interested in gets updated, you should know as soon as possible. And if you are not interested in something anymore, you should be able to make it go away.
- Mark waves as Read/Unread
- Just like Email, you can mark a Wave as Read or Unread. To do so, click the "Read" or "Unread" button in the toolbar on the wave pane. Unread waves show up in bold text in your inbox. Once you marking a wave as Read, you will see further updates marked differently when you open it. Newly inserted text will show up in yellow, deleted text will show up in red with a strike-through, and new blips will show up with a green vertical bar to the left.
- Use folders to keep your Inbox clean
- Reading Public waves is a good way to learn about how to use Google Wave, and discover gadgets, and robots, or find solutions to problems. However, as soon as you read a public wave, it will show up in your inbox. Read a few public waves, and your inbox gets cluttered, since every update to these waves sends them to the top of your inbox.
You can create folders, by clicking the (+) button next to the word "Folders" in the Navigation pane. 
To move a wave to a folder, select the wave, then click "Move to" and select the folder. A wave that's moved to a folder, will show up in your inbox again when updated. Moving waves to folders makes it easier to find them later, if they've been archived. (more on that below)- Don't want to follow a wave anymore?
- If you are no longer interested in knowing about updates to a wave, open that wave, and click the "Mute" button in the toolbar of the wave's pane.
(Remember to use the Mute button in the toolbar rather than the one in the Search pane. The buttons in the Search pane don't always work as expected.) Doing this will remove the wave from your inbox, and you will never be notified of updates to it. This is also true of waves you may have edited, or even started. Also, at this time other followers of that wave will have no way of knowing that you have muted it, so they may continue with the conversation assuming you are reading their updates. However, muted waves still appear in your search results. - If you want to see all the waves you've muted, search for "is:mute".
- If you want to search waves you've muted, append "is:mute" to the search query.
- If you want to excluded muted waves from search results, add "-is:mute" to the search query.
- Make a wave disappear till someone updates it
- The lesser the number of waves that appear in your inbox, the easier it is to manage. So once you have read all the latest updates in a wave, you might not want it to show up in your inbox till someone updates it again. To do this, select the wave, and click the Archive button in the toolbar of the wave's pane.
(Again, remember to use the button on the wave pane, not the one on the Search pane.) - Ignore a wave and stop it from showing up in searches
Muting a wave allows you to ignore any updates to a wave, but such a wave will still show up in your searches - with a small box with the word "Mute" near the title of the wave. If you are sure you have no interest in a wave anymore, you can send it to Trash. Just click the Trash button in the toolbar of the wave's pane. If your wave pane is too narrow, the Trash button might be hidden. Click the "..." button to show the remaining buttons on the toolbar. Just like Mute, other participants on a wave will not know you've sent that wave to your trash.
Labels: Google Wave, Technology, Tools
