Trying to Understand Google Wave

by Steve Fisher on November 16, 2009

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Have you been one of the lucky ones to get an invite to Google Wave? Well if you didn’t and want to know more about it, I am here to share and guide to a great resource from Gina Trapani. Over on Web Worker Daily they cover Gina Trapani’s new e-book, the complete guide to Google Wave.

Web Worker Daily says “Tech writers Gina Trapani and Adam Pash have created an online e-book, “The Complete Guide to Google Wave,” which does an excellent job of explaining what Google Wave is and how it can be used. The book provides step-by-step instructions on how to get invited to the service, what to do when you get there, and how to make the most of it.

From their web site, CompleteWaveGuide.com, they readily admit that it is a bit confusing to understand at first. “Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that’s notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you’ll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that’s evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes. Read more about The Complete Guide to Google Wave.

I am using Google Wave and I have to admit it is challenging at first but what I can say about the tool is it is like Twitter, IM and email had a baby. The real time collaboration and capture of the conversations or “Waves” make it a very interesting tool when working on a group email or a topic that needs the entire conversation captured.

The book on the web site is written in a clear, straightforward style, and is sprinkled with helpful and sometimes humorous quotes from Joss Whedon’s Firefly where on the show the communication method were called “Broadwaves” and people would say “Send me a Wave”. I am convinced that the whole Google Wave team are Browncoats (what fans of Firefly are called) and the error messages are very funny (do a google search on that one).

The Web Worker Daily site goes on to say “An electronic version of the book will be offered for sale beginning in November; it’s unclear whether the online version will continue to be available once the book comes out. So if you’re interested in Google Wave, this is an excellent time to learn more about it. But you may need some patience; the book’s web site has been very slow, as I suspect it’s getting more traffic than the authors expected.

Check out the site and let us know what you think of Google Wave.

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  • It still looks like a solution in search of a problem as far as I can tell.

    - John
  • snehaandani
    The problem with the folks like Google & Yahoo is that they have created many tools which have been loosely coupled. The challenge with such a solution is that the the information gets locked into multiple silos. With Google Wave they are trying to integrate all the conversations (discussions) but what would be truly desirable is a platform built form ground up using social networking at the base and business apps on top of it. I have tried Injoos Teamware (www.injoos.com) and found it captures both informal and formal knowledge like documents in one single workspace on the cloud.
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