Does anyone actually use google wave

Step inside to hear a two-word definition of Wave, what it's useful for, why you'd choose it over similar products, and how to do the things in Wave that most often trip up new users. Q: How do you describe what Google Wave is in the fewest words possible?

Ok, I cheated a little. Wikichat is my made-up word for the combination of document collaboration wikis and messaging chat. Imagine a Wikipedia page that only your workgroup can access and that multiple people can change simultaneously, with live, inline chat embedded in it and the ability to add online multimedia like an image slideshow , videos , maps , polls , a Sudoku game , video conference call , and other interactive widgets.

See it? That's Wave. Relax and be free from anxiety Take back good sleep and help alleviate pain. A: You'd use Wave instead of email because you can have real-time, IM-like conversations inside it, and cut out the lag time of asynchronous email communication—you know, when you send an email and have to wait for your recipients to read, reply, and send one back.

In Wave, if your recipient is online, you don't have to wait. In fact, your recipient can start typing before you stop. It's wacky. A: You'd use Wave instead of instant messenger because you can edit the same text, images, captions as someone else is at the same time. During an instant messenger conversation you pass back and forth a series of single-author, uneditable messages.

In Wave, anyone can edit any message or blip, in Wave-speak. Imagine correcting someone else's typos during a chat yourself, without pointing out to them that they mistyped.

Wave also supports conversation threads, which means that instead of one linear discussion where new messages appear on top or below old ones, you can branch off sub-chats on different topics in one wave.

But mostly you use Wave to collaborate on a single copy of a document with multiple people at the same time. Wave is more like a real-time wiki, which creates pages meant to be linked and constantly revised, pages that contain web-based multimedia and interactive gadgets.

In Wave you can drop multimedia like image slide shows, YouTube videos, Google Maps, and countless other gadgets that you can't in Google Docs. Like a wiki and unlike Google Docs , you can link waves to each other very easily. Wave is more like a real-time, workgroup Wikipedia than Google Docs or email. A: Wave works when two or more people need to co-write a document. A few common use cases include:. The following are questions I've gotten from people already in the Wave Preview, trying to figure out how to use the system.

Tech Bytes. Newsletters Tech Top 5. Morning Dispatch. Mithun Varkey. Rate Story. Font Size Abc Small. Abc Medium. Abc Large. What Wave does is to integrate e-mail, instant messaging IM , collaboration, Google maps as well as search. It actually empowers your browser to handle all your communication needs. The Wave, however, requires a Chrome Frame plug-in to function on the ubiquitous Internet Explorer as of now.

Google makes an innovation leap with the Wave. Wave is both a product and an open source platform for developers for building new apps. Stay on top of technology and startup news that matters. Subscribe to our daily newsletter for the latest and must-read tech news, delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe to ETPrime. Browse Companies:. Find this comment offensive? One way to think of it is as a mashup of threaded e-mail conversations and instant messaging -- on steroids.

Rich content, including Google maps, interactive polling, videos and more, can be embedded in conversations called waves. And the rich content is live and interactive. If you embed a Google map, for example, all participants in the conversation can use it as if they were on the Google Maps site.

All this makes for a kind of in-depth collaboration that's not possible with more traditional means of Internet communication. Theoretically, Google Wave can help groups share information, make decisions and take actions more quickly. That's in theory, though. In practice, it's not clear what will happen, because traditional e-mail still rules most people's lives. At this point, Google Wave is still in a relatively tightly controlled, invitation-only beta.

Given that it's free, however, once it becomes public -- or if you're lucky enough to score an invite -- it's worth your while to test it out, if only for the "coolness" factor. Google Wave's overall interface resembles a traditional e-mail client. Its window is divided into three panes: contacts and navigation on the left, a browsable list of all of your "waves" in the middle, and the actual wave you're involved in on the right.