How To Ride The Google Wave!

Today is a Monday; the last monday in November of the year 2009. The time now, where I’m at is 20:55. Around 14:45 today, I was checking my email, and I notice I had gotten my Google Wave invite. I clicked on the mail link, and then clicked on another link inside the mail. Which was my Google Wave home page. I was just like you: not knowing what the hell to do, where to start, and what to click; I only had automatically one contact in my “Contacts”.

Since I had one contact, I played, tested it out for a bit. I sent my contact a message asking what this whole Google Wave thing is about.

So I started googling. I found some support on Google Wave. I click on the first link that caught my eyes: which was, “Google Wave basics.” It brought me to a page that had this video that was about 1 hour and 20 minutes long. I highly doubt if you’ll have the patience to sit through the hour and twenty minutes. The video explain what google wave is and could do.

After I understood Google wave, And blogging about it, I read the “What is Google Wave?“ in the support on Google Wave. I’ll save you a click and tell you what you’ll read: “

Google Wave is an online communication and collaboration tool that makes real-time interactions more seamless — in one place, you can communicate and collaborate using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is a conversation with multiple participants — participants are people added to a wave to discuss and collaborate on its content. Participants can reply any time and anywhere within a wave, and they can edit content and add more participants as a wave develops. It’s also possible to rewind waves with the playback functionality, to see what happened, and when.” That’s it!

I don’t know if you understood what they are saying. To sum It up in a nut-shell, I believe Google Wave is like Twitter and AIM rolled into one.

It’s like you start a tweet (in real time) and you could pick any one of your “followers” to join in on that tweet; then, that follower could throw in his/her 2¢ in the tweet (in real time (as you are typing the tweet, it’s showing word for word on your followers computer screen. And as your follower is typing his/her saying in the tweet (conversation), your computer screen is being shown what your follower is adding to your tweet, word for word, letter to letter.)), and that follower could bring in any of his/her’s followers to join the conversation (the Wave).

How to add people to Wave with:

Just like every social site out there, you are giving a user name. Your user name is the name you identify yourself on a social site. To add, or be added you must send out (tell people) your user name with the “@googlewave.com” extension. For example: yourusername@googlewave.com. To add people to Wave with, you have to add them to your “Contacts“. Just click the button that have the + sign button on your “Contacts” panel, then add your contact in the “Address” field.

Haven’t got an invite  to Google Wave yet? Request an invite now.

If you feel this blog helped you get a little insight to what Google Wave is bout and how to use it, comment on this post to let me know your thoughts. And to help more people get a better insight about Google Wave, tweet this blog in your tweets with the “Google Wave” topic.

If you like, add me to your Google Wave’s Contacts: empdotlife@googlewave.com

Also follow me on Twitter: EmPdotLife