An Introduction to Google Wave

By Sarah Granger

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Google Wave is the latest big new product hyped in the social media world. Google Wave is intended to be a robust tool for ongoing online collaboration, a browser-based amalgamation of modern group communications including e-mail, SMS, Instant Messaging, Jabber, Twitter, discussion forums, wikis and the like. Based on real time messaging technology, it focuses on "conversation" objects between groups of people that can be saved and accessed at any time.

Wave was first introduced to developers in the late spring, and it entered the preview mode recently, with limited accounts provided in small groups via invitation only. Google has done this in the past with other applications like Orkut and Gmail both to induce more interest in the products and to limit the testing while the product is still being tweaked. At Digital Landing, we tried Google Wave and assessed both its current capabilities and future possibilities. So, here is your introduction to Google Wave.

How Google Wave Works

After getting an account configured, which ideally should be done with an existing Google (Gmail) e-mail address or it will not allow users to use the same username as in the existing account, users can start adding contacts. Next to the Manage Contacts button is a plus sign that, once selected, will bring up a search box where e-mail addresses can be added. Clicking on Manage Contacts brings up a window where contacts can easily be imported from other accounts. Anyone else who is online is indicated with a little green dot at the bottom right side of the avatar.

To add an avatar and set up the user profile, click on your name under Contacts to go to an edit window where you can add in full name, website, and provide a status update as in Facebook or other social networking applications. Google Wave should be ready for use at this point.

The Inbox shows conversations or "waves" where each user is a participant. Creating new waves and adding contacts to the waves is easy.  First, drag and drop (or use the little plus button) in the new wave. Each wave shows the number of unread messages. Attached images, gadgets and other files can be accessed easily with buttons at the bottom of wave windows.

Users have the capability to follow or unfollow waves as with Twitter or other similar feed-based software, and different folders can be created and used accordingly. Each wave can be marked by tags as well, and when waves are no longer in use, they can easily be archived. It's also possible to link to waves and invite others to join that way.

Critical Mass

When LinkedIn and Twitter first launched, very few people signed up, and those of us who did weren't using it very often because there wasn't much to see. It was difficult to understand the usefulness of the tools with very few users. Once they hit a critical mass in the tech community and began expanding to other sectors, they caught on. The nature of social media means that it only works with enough people actively involved. Wave hasn't gotten to that point yet, so the only way to make it helpful at this early stage is to find others actively using it and find ways to reach out to them.

When you import contacts, Wave determines who already has a Wave account and automatically connects you to those people. It also makes it easy to e-mail them from your default e-mail program. And it's easy to merge contacts. That's the best way to find others to build waves and networks. It's also possible to embed private threads within waves, and the coming document sharing tools should help Wave catch on faster.

Alpha Beta

Google aims to build a tool set that merges the benefits of Gmail, Google Docs, Google Chat, their future Social Search tool and Chrome all into one with Wave at the center, but it's not quite ready for prime time. Power users have complained of slow performance, clunky scrollbar use and browser problems. Little things like the tiny status window can be adjusted, but overall, people have been complaining that the initial user experience isn't what it should be. It's also difficult to delete parts of waves you initiate and to uninvite people if they were added by accident.

The good news is that with the limited features available in Wave, people are already finding ways to make it useful, especially if they pair it with Google's Chrome browser on Windows. Many early adopters envision Wave catching on and becoming a robust tool for project collaboration in the near future. Given a year or two for them to tweak the product, flush out features and merge it into their existing software, Google could be to the business community what Facebook is to personal networks.