Mr-Ray

Already know about Mr-Ray? Click here to install him!

Did you know that e-mail was invented 40 years ago? Google Wave holds many advantages over e-mail but everyone is still stuck on it. Why? E-mail is so successful because everyone has it, everyone can use it and everyone can participate. So what happens when you are using Wave and you want to include someone who is still on E-mail? At the moment you have limited options, for example:

you could paste the relevant parts into an e-mail and paste their response back into wave
you could take a screenshot of the wave and e-mail it as an attachment and then paste their response back into wave

Neither solution is very elegant and as soon is the e-mail is sent the Wave may change and the e-mail becomes obsolete. So what do you do? How do you include people by e-mail without them needing to sign up to Google Wave? Use Mr-Ray the wav-e-mail bot!

Introducing Mr-Ray

Mr-Ray provides a way to include non Google Wave users in a Wave. When a Wave changes an e-mail is dispatched to all e-mail participants with a link. When they follow this link they can view the Wave and interact with it. It’s almost as good as having a Wave account! To get stuck in use the extension installer and select “New Wave with e-mail participants” from the New Wave menu or add mr-ray@appspot.com. To give Mr-Ray a go you can use the sample wave or if you’re not sure what to do and want to see it in action watch the following video…

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Can’t figure out what to do? Do you want help using Mr-Ray?

Think there is something up with Mr-Ray? Report the bug and help us improve.

Want to know what features we are planning for Mr-Ray? Take a look at our roadmap.

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Mr-Ray terms of use.

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Comments (19)

#1 written by GWaveExtensions
about 5 months ago

Wow this is really fantastic!
#2 written by Wei
about 5 months ago

I added the extension but Mr-Ray is not showing up in my contact list. Anything else I need to do?
#3 written by Tom
about 5 months ago

If you added ‘mr-ray@appspot.com’ as a contact he should appear in your contact list. If you used the extension installer there will be a small drop down box next to the ‘new wave’ button at the top of your inbox. Press this and there will be an option ‘New Wave with email participants’… click this and you should have a new wave with Mr-Ray.

Hope this helps!
#4 written by WAVEsfera.com
about 5 months ago

It’s really nice, one of the most impressive Wave extensions of this year, surely!!
#5 written by Ray Ryan
about 5 months ago

Very exciting! I already have two wishes, though.

First, any plans to tie it less tightly to email? It would be great if I could make a public html view of a Wave, and allow people to subscribe themselves from there. Or even better, ask for Wave invites from there.

Second, it’s still pretty week on formatting. Compare the following to its Mr-Ray page:

https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BKEONTvE6C
#6 written by Tom
about 5 months ago

There are plans are in the pipeline for a public view where anyone can reply as anonymous… so in terms of that sit tight.

In terms of formatting this is on the way too. We have designs ready to implement the annotations, form elements and gadgets… however these need a fair bit of development.
#7 written by Eyal
about 5 months ago

This is a very cool app with a great potential. The video is awesome!

I tried it yesterday and I encountered some issues that need to be solved in the full version, as you are aware, but in overall it works smoothly and as described. Fantastic work.

I think that as you advance in developing Mr-Ray, you should consider packaging the so-called “wave lite” platform separately, and making it available outside the emailwave context.
#8 written by Timothy Brown
about 5 months ago

I am really impressed with this robot. I do have a question. I take it that you (the creators of Mr. Ray) can see content that is displayed at http://mr-ray.appspot.com/ (even though you have no interest in it). So perhaps this should not be used for confidential content??
#9 written by Tom
about 5 months ago

Hey Timothy,

We don’t store any content from the Wave on our servers this is still stored on the Google Wave servers. What we store is the data required to reference the wave and some details about you, this includes wave id, wavelet id, e-mail address etc. To enable the read/unread status in the Mr-Ray view we also store a list of blip id’s that you have read, again no blip content is stored on our servers. For full details on our terms of use you can visit http://wave.to/projects/mr-ray/terms-and-conditions or if you have any more concerns reply, or use the contact page http://wave.to/contact

Hope this helps!
Tom
#10 written by Kathryn
about 3 months ago

I love Mr. Ray so far! But is there way you can please have my name included in the “From” field in the e-mail (or even somewhere in the subject line)? Many of my contacts won’t open e-mails from people they don’t recognize.
#11 written by Tom
about 3 months ago

Hey,

We could put it in the from field however we are going to come up against all sorts of problems with spam filters.

We are looking at placing it the subject line somewhere but the final design of e-mails is still up for debate at the moment(e-mails have been a tricky subject for some time)
#12 written by Nicholas Orr
about 3 months ago

Since anyone can use Wave now – is this needed?

I’m just wondering if I should use it or get the email people onto Wave…

Thanks

Nick
#13 written by Tom
about 3 months ago

Hey Nicholas. I’ve just answered the same question in a wave, so I hope you don’t mind if I paste the same response here… I believe it will answer your question….

Although we say it is open to everyone…. really it has been for some time. I don’t know if you have tried to get a wave account but we have found when you request one you get it within about 12 hours.

So you are pretty much right in not needing to create a Google account, plus for many people they are unaware of what wave is/how to use it. If you say to them stop using e-mail start using wave their response is often why? How can I contact my e-mail contacts? This is where Mr-Ray becomes useful… in supporting legacy systems such as e-mail.

On top of this Mr-Ray can provide a customized interface (although it looks very wave wavey at the moment, this is through choice) and as you well know the wave-lite platform is much lighter on resources than Wave. In this respect Mr-Ray is only the tip of the iceberg and the underlaying framework and platform that we have in place are the really exciting things. Take our preview of Wave-up. Ok it’s not quite ready for the wider audience yet but that was put together in just a few days using the framework and only requires some interface fixes to integrate it tightly to a mobile platform.

There are a lot of exciting developments under way with Mr-Ray and the whole Wave-lite platform so keep your eyes fixed on wave.to, you can expect to see some exciting stuff coming up over the next month whether you are a developer or end-user

Hope this helps!
Tom
#14 written by Mike
about 3 months ago

That seems a bit too complicated merely for having people be able to use a wave without an account.

Why can’t people just use some waves via a URL? In different words, why can’t Wave have a mode in which it works like drop.io?
#15 written by Tom
about 3 months ago

I guess google want to keep wave closed to account holders only, in the same way e-mails are closed to account holders only.
#16 written by Nick
about 2 months ago

One thing that would be great for this bot is if it would retain line feeds/carriage returns from the wave to the linked version.

Great app! Thanks!
#17 written by Tom
about 2 months ago

it should do…. I think this is a bug. I will look into fixing it

Tom
#18 written by Kryptykfysh
about 1 month ago

Is there a problem with the bot at the moment? Any time I try to add an email subscriber, the action never completes. On refreshing the page, you get the ‘No e-mail participants are included on this Wave. Press add to include some…’ message.
#19 written by Tom
about 1 month ago

Judging by the time that your comment came in I think the app engine datastore was in read only mode. It should work now though

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