A Google Wave Guide For Dummies

Today i got my invitation for Google’s new service called “Google Wave”. It was not something new to me since i already had access to the sandbox but today i finally found some time to play with it. I found some excellent features and some things that i think it would be great if the guys at Google implement in the near feature. We use simple plain language in this article. Wavelets,blips and other stuff might be difficult for some users to follow.

We also found that waves are easier to follow on Google Chrome (wonder why?) since the memory amount used when using it with Firefox and Opera is much larger than Google’s browser and that live typing is something folks at Google should reconsider adding it as an option.

The interface

This is how Wave looks like this (the red sections are to explain what each section is and does):

This is what each red section is:

1) The navigation menu. An easy way to find your waves, edit your settings (still under construction), your saved searches will appear here and you can also create folders to organize your waves.

2) Your contacts are here. You can add other people, see recent waves from each person and ping them. Ping is a kind of a private wave that will do what it’s name implies. Notifies the user of your presence. You can also start a new wave with a user and automatically add the user as a participant.

3) This is where some Google search magic takes place. You can do nearly anything from this section. You can start a new wave by clicking on the “New Wave” button, search for waves about something, for example : “php”, you can search using custom search terms like:

• by: Username here. Shows waves started by the user or a wave where the user added some participants
• with: email or username here. Shows waves where the user participated in.
• in: folder here. Shows waves in the folder.
• tag: tag name here. Shows waves tagged with this tag.

The “me” keyword can be used with “by” and “with” and will display waves associated with the active user.

4) The active waves for the active user. If the wave includes a gadget, it will display a green puzzle image next to the wave text. If the wave has attachments, it will display an attachment image next to the wave text. If the wave has new messages or edits, the number of new messages will be highlighted with green color. Read only waves are marked with a gray colored Muted sign.

5) The participants of the current wave. You can add as many participants you want in a wave or remove someone (not ready yet). A very interesting feature is that you can drag a contact in a wave to add as a participant too.

6) Some basic commands that allow you to reply, mute, trash or mark a wave as read or spam. When you go to edit mode (when you write a message or edit one) this section looks like this:

You see some text formating tools. Some of them you already know what they do but there are 4 more tools there:

The attachment icon will let you upload a file into a wave, the G+ button will popup a window that will let you search with google and add the result in the wave. The next button lets you add a Google gadget in the wave. This means that all gadgets found here can be used in a wave. The next 2 buttons are wave extensions. Extensions are plugins that add extra functionality to a wave. As a reference, the first button adds a Yes/No/Maybe gadget and the second one adds a maps gadget.

7) Here is how a gadget looks like in a wave.

8) Actions for reacting with the message. You can edit it, leave a reply to this message or a private reply that will be visible only by the author of the message or any participant that you want. You can also copy the message to a new wave and start a new wave that has other purpose of the wave you are into.

9) A message.

10) Existing replies of a message.

11) You can tag a wave here. You can then search for this wave with this tag.

12) This button will let you download all files in the active wave, upload new files or create a new wave with these files.

Cool additions and uses

It would be great if wave could understand the filetype of a file and open it in a wave. For example a user uploads a video or a flash movie and the  file starts playing at once or with a click on a play button. A user uploads a document and a new wavelet is created with the contents of the file.

Waves could become nice slideshow aware image galleries too. For example a user embeds a wave to a site and sets the wave to show images as a slideshow. So the only thing needed are the images to be dropped into the wave.

Commenting on blogs, replying on forums or creating blogs and forums based on Google wave are some of the first things that come in mind of many people but the “wave” is something bigger.

We will come back with some insights of the API too in a future post.

Popularity: 8%

Related posts:

1. Our Favorite Google Wave Extensions And Add-ons Google Wave is gaining more and more attention from developers...
2. Creating A Google Wave Extension In 5 Steps This is a simple to follow tutorial on how to...
3. Google Visualizations From A To Z Google has released an API that you can use to...
4. Technologies That Will Change The Web Some years ago, the mp3 format was invented. It was...
5. Use Google’s Power To Create Powerfull Search Engines (Part II) In our previous article, we learned how to create a...