A Revolution Round the Bend? Google Wave Hits Beta : Adworkz

Get Your Conversations, Docs and Apps in One Super App

Ride the Google Wave, from customer polls to document revision (Photo: flickr.com)

If you’re looking for applications that help you interact and share with colleagues and clients in real time, it appears that Google may soon be delivering a wave of goodness your way.

Google Wave Beta Has Come Ashore

Tired of waiting for E-mail? Want to be able to easily share documents and rich media with others in real time? Want to be able to conference with a Google Talk-style audio system or instant message interface at the same time? How about having the ability for an individual to rewind a conversation if they join late? Google Wave is an open-source answer to all of these issues and more.

Think of the Way Gmail Handles E-mail

E-mail conversation threads are called “conversations” in Gmail. Google Wave handles meetings and all of its other features in much the same way. The way Google describes Google Wave, it is “equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more.”

Most Importantly, It’s Shared

That means that any person – be it client or colleague – who participates in a Google Wave can reply, edit, add participants or simply play back what’s happened at any point in the formation of the Wave. Whenever a change is made, an announcement moves to the top of the wave so participants know. This is all done live, so participants can see comments and additions by others as they’re being input into the Wave. And Google Wave provides contextual natural language suggestions; it’s easy to catch mistakes on the fly so you do not seem like you’re a horrible speller.

Riding a Google Wave

Thanks to Lifehacker for an extended walkthrough. I’ll briefly hit some of the high points.

The default view in Google Wave is a three-column layout that features four separate modules. These are Navigation (like the Inbox, Sent, and Labels in Gmail); Contacts (like the Google Talk friends list, where a green dot appears if a contact is online); a list of active Waves in your Inbox; and finally an area where you can begin a new wave or open an existing one. Each module can be minimized.

Creating a Wave

It’s as easy as beginning an E-mail conversation. Add participants from your contact list by name, or simply drag and drop them in. Then watch it all happen in real time. Reply to the entire wave, or just bits of the whole conversation. It’s like making annotations to a document. Private replies are also possible. Furthermore, each reply is treated as a Google Wave of its own. So if an idea from a conversation branches off into a separate line of conversation, you can easily view that conversation and make comments, edits or do whatever else you’d like. Google Wave is highly flexible that way.

Google Wave Revision Playback

This is the feature I mentioned previously, where late joiners can replay what they missed to get up to speed quickly. Just click the playback button and watch the conversation replay as it formed over time. Lifehacker compares this to watching the slide show that tracks changes made to a Wikipedia page.

If you want to search for a specific element in the Wave, you’ve got the power of Google Search capability. Something else nifty that Google Wave does for search and organization purposes is to enable folder usage. Whether you want to get rid of a Wave or file it away, you can do so via a drag-and-drop interface.

Don’t Forget the Gadgets and Robots

Being completely open source, Google Wave is easy to expand with gadgets and robots. There is a small base currently available for the pre-selected Beta testers, but this will surely expand after the official launch. Gadgets are rich content that can be added to a Wave. Some examples are polls, games and even gadgets that make conference call management easy. They can also be embedded into Web sites. A business might be able to involve customers in dynamic, real-time exchanges of ideas and opinions.

Robots are E-mail addresses you can insert into your list of contacts. When you need a robot to modify the contents of a Google Wave in some way, you add the bot to that Wave. A bot that Lifehacker found useful (and one that could be very useful for a business that wants to quickly update their blog for customers in real time) is Bloggy (blog-wave@appspot.com). It publishes Google Waves directly to Blogger platform blogs. If a Wave user happens to come upon such a blog post, they can comment on the post and the comment will show up in the originator’s Wave client. Talk about hearing the customer and being able to respond fast!

Want an App for Meetings and Collaboration? Wave Hello!

Once Google Wave makes its official launch, the user base should grow quickly. A Mashable poll currently indicates that readers think Google Wave won’t be an overnight success, but with time it should catch on. I think that’s because you really need to have a large base of colleagues (and customers) with access to the application. Only then can you truly come to appreciate Google Wave’s real power.

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