About a week ago I received an email from a friend--a software architect--who was encouraging me to join Google's newest invention: Google Wave. He was very enthused about how it eases communication and collaboration among people in many levels and very persuasive that I should give it a try. I must admit that I was very hesitant and skeptical at the beginning , mostly because I didn't want to create another account and memorize yet another user name and password. Soon enough though, I discovered that I can use my already existing Gmail user name and password to log into Google Wave. So, I logged in and started playing with it immediately. Here, I am gonna share a few things that I have learned about it so far.
What gave life to Google Wave, according to Google team, was the fact that email, in its present form, was created some 40 years ago. So they thought: "What would it look like if it were invented today?". Basically, they combined many existing applications, such as, email, chat, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and called it Google Wave!
A "wave" is like an email and creating it is just as easy. What make it interesting are its other powerful features. For example, after creating a new wave, users have the option of adding several gadgets to it--such as, maps, photo albums, polling tools, flowcharts--with a simple drag and drop action. Users can search the web by clicking on Google Search that is on wave's menu bar (there is no need to open another browser).
Apart from the standard text formatting tools (like, different fonts, text sizes, text colors), users can add hyperlinks to their text too. Users can also add their twitter or blogger accounts to their waves and read, tweet, leave comments, or reply without leaving wave.
Google Wave is a powerful tool for planning group projects and brainstorming. Participants in a wave can leave comments anywhere in the message or edit the content. Since wave is a real-time hosted communication, participants can view a comment as it is being typed in.
Its other powerful feature is playback. Users can simply click on the playback button and watch who created the wave or added each comment and at what time. This is very useful for following sequence of discussions when there are too many participants and comments in one wave.
There is an introductory video about Google Wave that gives a quick overview of some of its features and benefits. Google Wave is still in preview phase, so some of the features do not function properly yet. It is not readily accessible to the general public either. If interested, you can fill out an application and wait for Google to send you an invitation to join. After joining, you can also invite your friends--it is a collaborative environments after all! Note that it may take you a few days to get this privilege. Currently, one can only invite up to 8 people.
Just like any other newbie, I still need some time to familiarize myself with this tool. However, as a believer of Google and its innovative products, I am quite certain that Google Wave will become the next widespread communication tool of our time.
As Google team says: "Happy waving!".
