Revolutionize Your Email Game with Google Wave: The Ultimate Communication Tool of the Future
In the world of digital communication, email has long been one of the most popular and widely used mediums. However, as technology has evolved, so too have our expectations for what email should be able to deliver. Enter Google Wave, a revolutionary new communication tool that promises to change the way we think about email.
What is Google Wave?
Google Wave is a real-time messaging platform that combines the features of email, instant messaging, and social networking. Created by Google, it was first introduced to the public in 2009 as a way to simplify communication and collaboration in both personal and professional settings.
Unlike traditional email, Google Wave allows for dynamic, interactive messages that can be edited and updated in real-time by multiple users. Users can add and remove participants, reply to specific messages, and even embed maps, videos, and other interactive elements directly into their messages.
Why Google Wave?
The benefits of using Google Wave are numerous. For starters, it eliminates the need for multiple modes of communication by combining them all into one streamlined platform. It also allows for more efficient and effective collaboration, as users can see changes happening in real-time and respond with immediate feedback.
In addition, Google Wave is designed to be highly secure, with features such as end-to-end encryption and two-factor authentication. This makes it an ideal choice for businesses and organizations that need to share sensitive information securely.
And perhaps most importantly, Google Wave is completely free to use, with no hidden fees or upfront costs. This makes it accessible to anyone who wants to improve their communication and collaboration skills.
How to get started with Google Wave?
Getting started with Google Wave is easy. Simply sign up for a free account on the Google Wave website, and you’ll be ready to start creating and sharing dynamic, interactive messages with your colleagues, friends, and family members.
To make the most of Google Wave, we recommend taking advantage of the platform’s built-in features, such as the ability to tag messages and search for specific content. You can also customize your user settings to fit your own specific needs and preferences.
In conclusion, if you’re looking for a way to revolutionize your email game and take your communication skills to the next level, Google Wave is the ultimate tool for the job. With its real-time messaging, collaboration features, and enhanced security, it’s the perfect choice for anyone who wants to stay ahead of the curve in today’s fast-paced digital world.
Google’s not afraid to reinvent the wheel, as long as they think they can make a better wheel. So far, in my opinion at least, they’re usually successful. That being said, when I first heard about Google Wave, the new browser based communications system, I was skeptical. I like my emails, IMs, message boards and blogs the way they are. Could Wave really transform the way I communicate online? Could Google really reinvent email in a way powerful enough to pull me from my beloved GMail? Well through my massive underground operative network I was able to get one of the beta invitations to try out Wave for myself.
So what is it exactly?
According to Google:
Intriguing, but not very specific. Suffice it to say, each “Wave” is like an email thread or message board post. The difference is that you’re not just posting a series of replies (though you certainly can use it that way), you’re making changes to a single document. Each change becomes a branch of the original message. You can roll a wave back in time to see how the conversation has evolved. If you get added to a pre-existing wave, you get the whole thing – the document (or thread) as-is, along with its entire history. Waves can be embedded into blogs, so any time a change is made to that wave it can show up in something like Blogger in near real time. We’ll cover the most interesting Wave features in more detail as we go.
Using a Wave
The Wave exists online, and can be accessed a few different ways. The most common would probably be through a “Wave Client”, ie a GMail-like web app that displays your Waves in the browser window. Here is an example of the main wave.google.com
On the far left we’ve got a pretty familiar webmail style menu, with the usual Inbox, etc. Below that is your contacts. Wave seems to have imported my GMail contacts and added those who are also signed in here. The center pane shows your message history much like any email client, including the pic for each participant in the wave.
Things get more interesting when we get to the right pane. Here we can view, edit, and create waves. In this example, I wrote a Kurt Vonnegut quote to Crystal. She responded not by creating a separate reply, but by editing my original words. When I get back to Wave and see her message, Wave highlights the changes she has made.
This means you could use a single wave to have multiple people, say, write a paper for school or collaborate on a family Christmas list. All changes are essentially real time, each change creating a new branch with a complete backup history. In fact, Wave provides a playback feature that allows you to step through the document from creation to the present.
Extensions
Wave expects and encourages user-developed extensions. As it’s still in development, there aren’t many choices yet. The extensions that do exist are all fairly useful. First, you can perform a Google search and include the results in the wave. No real surprises there.
Next is the single-click Yes/No box. Of all the things to include in an early release I’m a little surprised the Yes/No box was one of them, but I suppose it demonstrates some of the things you can do with extensions.
The results were unanimous.
There is also a Maps extension, which is another single click surprise. I have to admit, this would make it a lot easier to exchange directions.
As I write this, a new wave just arrived in my inbox for the Google Wave Extension Gallery. I can browse and install new extensions from within the wave. Presumably the wave will be updated as new extensions come out.
Conclusion
There is FAR more to Google Wave than I could possibly cover here, and this is still a fairly early development version. For those who want all the details, you can find a LONG (80 minutes) video of the tech demo here. For something with so drastically different from email on the technical side, Wave manages to feel surprisingly comfortable. The technology is certainly impressive, and it’s easy to adjust to the Wave way of doing things once you’ve spent a few minutes using it. As for usefulness, that’s a little harder to judge. From what I’ve seen, Wave only works if everyone else is also using it. As great as the map feature may be, the recipient would of course need to be a Wave user as well. Not that this is a flaw in Wave exactly, but it does place a limit on how useful it can be. I think it’s got a lot of potential, and I’ll be keeping a Wave tab open for a while to see how things go, but I won’t go closing my webmail tab just yet.
Josh Price is a senior MakeTechEasier writer and owner of Rain Dog Software
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