Google Wave Explained in Simple Terms

There is more to Google wave than meets the eye. Wave buzz is all round the internet and people are talking about its collaboration capabilities. Often many fail to understand this and wonder how it works? This article tries to explain wave in simple terms so that you don’t get perplexed when you face it.

Google wave was launched at Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. According to wiki, it is “a personal communication and collaboration tool”. With Google Wave, you can communicate in real time and collaborate easily with your colleagues. The wave technology gives you comfortable approach to use emails, instant messaging (IM), social networking, wiki and sharing files at same time seamlessly.

Let’s understand some of the fundamentals:

What is a wave?

A wave is mixture of text, pics, videos, maps to communicate between people. It is shared among people of your choice. That means, you can add people from your contacts list or group people for the conference. Anyone can come and go in between a wave and they can edit the content at any point of time. Wave lives in real time. As soon as you type, other participants can see it, interact and edit in real time.

When to use Google Wave?

Google wave is ideal for :

• Meetings

• Group projects

• Organizing events

• Brain Storming

• And sharing pictures with group

Unique features of Google Wave

• Multiple people can edit similar content at same time.
  Since Wave provide real time collaboration and with unique concurrency control technology from Google, all people can edit content at the same time. Example: Multi-authored document.

• Equipped with natural language tool, wave provides contextual suggestions and spelling corrections.

• View playback of thread.
  Consider the scenario, a participant joins the wave and he has no idea what others are discussing on. Using the playback feature, he can track the tread from the start and see the content contributed by individual users with respect to time.

• Do more with applications and extensions.
  Just like iGoogle gadgets or Facebook applications, you can add more functionality to your wave with extensions.

• Drag-and-drop file sharing.
  Just drag a file from your desktop to the browser and wave will automatically upload and share it with other participants.

Interesting but Fulite Information

• Wave is not a mailing system. Don’t it get confused with Gmail. There is no way you can send regular mails with wave.

• Google wave is open source. That means you can develop your own application around it with this API.

• Wave can be easily embedded in any website or blog. Learn more here.

• If you are already using Google wave and find no friends there, then the first thing to do is to search “with:public” which gives the list of all the public waves to experiment with.

• Wave automatically creates unique accounts based on your name i.e. you@googlewave.com

• Gmail + Gtalk + Picassa + Gdocs = Gwave

Get to know more about wave and its features from these videos:

Getting Invited to Google Wave

I have few invites (25) left. Comment of this article and give a negative but genuine feedback to receive them.

Or get invited from Google by filling this sign up form.

Or use this query to get recent Google wave invite news . [Here]

Or join Lifehacker’s invitation thread to get an invite. [Here]