Understanding Google wave

Hey!

 Google Wave has gone public and is now available for everyone! All you need is a google account and you are all set to wave, literally! This article will try to explain some basic features of the wave and will help you get started using this great innovation.

The dashboard

Lets call the homepage of the google wave as "The dashboard" for the sake of convenience. Here's a screenshot of the dashboard.

The top left is your navigation menu. It contains a host of other options and add on applications called extensions that aims to ease your work and simplify your collaboration requirements. 

The bottom left panel is where your existing contacts are shown. You can also add/remove contacts in this panel. Even drag drop works!

The third panel, the inbox panel is just like your email inbox. This is the place where all your waves, conversations are archived chronologically. The upper tab also allows you to search within the inbox message contents very quickly. 

The panel at the extreme right is the place where all your wave activity, ranging from sharing pictures, editing documents, chat, group discussions takes place. There are self descriptive icons for each of the functions supported. 

All the panels of the dashboard are fully resizable and can also be minimized or hidden when required. 

Initiate a wave meet

Let us start by clicking a blank wave as shown below.

This will throw you a new panel as shown below. 

Choose to accept google gears if prompted. This will fasten up your page load times. Now to add contact, drag drop your contacts on the wave panel and you are now ready to start a wave meet with your friend. 

The chatting occurs in real time i.e your friends can see as you type. They need not wait until you hit the enter key! The level of interactivity has been considerably improved. Unlike conventional methods, you can just simply drag drop images from you computer to the wave panel and its shared instantly.

 A thumbnail preview is shown and can be maximized on to a clean black background too. Just like those online flash galleries.

The User Interface [UI] is quite intuitive and works just the way you want it, though google claims that there might be some bugs still. Say you accidentally added your friend to your boss's meeting and you want him removed, no need to head over to options, stumble onto remove contact. This time you do it in google style, yes, you guessed it, just drag and drop him back to your contacts list. He will be immediately removed from your meeting list. 

Here's a video from Google highlighting some special features of their wave:

The overall interface of the google wave is neat, clean, simple, intuitive and quite appealing. Google wave, A revolution in human collaboration??