Google Wave

Posted on Oct 18th 2009 | 12comments

You might have already noticed that the web world is all buzzing around with Google Wave. It’s frequently on the trending topics on Twitter and there are already numerous posts on all the major blogs about Google Wave.

So, what actually is Google Wave?

Google Wave is basically a personal collaboration and communication tool which has been designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging and social networking.

Know more about Google Wave here

I finally received my Google Wave invite a week ago after months of waiting and amidst all the hype surrounding Google Wave.

So, without any delay, I jumped on it and was lucky enough to find two of my friends already there, which gave me the opportunity to begin experimenting with wave.

Here is a screenshot of Google Wave (Click on the image to enlarge)

It looks somewhat familiar to Gmail (but a lot more slick!) with a navigation panel on top-left of your screen and a contacts panel on the bottom left of your screen. Similarly, you have an Inbox panel in the center of the screen. However, you can also see another panel on the right of the screen which is the Wave panel. All the action happens here!

To begin, you’ll have to click on the “New Wave” button, which will open a new wave in the wave panel. You can then add a number of users and groups to this wave by clicking on the “+” button given at the top of the wave panel.

As Google Wave is a real time collaboration tool, you can indeed see your friends typing!!

Sharing images and videos on wave is a piece of cake. Just click the attachment icon given at the top of the wave panel and you are ready to go!

You can see your images and videos in real time inside the wave panel. Clicking on the image thumbnail will open the full image in a lightbox

You can also add various gadgets to your wave, like the Google Map gadget or the poll gadget.

This was just a brief overview on Google Wave. It is still in active development. Google is also developing Wave API's which can be used by developers to develop extensions and program robots for Google Wave. So, expect a lot of new things on Google Wave in near future!

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