A Summary Explanation:

Google defines it as "A Simple communication object." It is simply making a new Wave. The wave has conversations, collaboration, media, tweets etc. It will function as (Notice I didn't say replace) many applications that you use to communicate these days. Like the following:

• A simple email conversation can be done between 2 or more people, absentee or real time, so you can say, email/chat/IM/SMS rolled into one.
• Instant Mesaging conv will be done, when 2 or more people are on the same wave at the same time (Updates are instantaneous like IM)
• Easy to share photos or other media, Wiki like sites, Click and drag (See below details)
• Collaboratively edit waves/documents. Very impressive, multiple people can update at the same time.
• OS Platform that can let competing companies create Blogging sites, discussion groups, or even a clone of the Wave program so everyone can communicate together within an Intranet or a compbination intra/internet.,
• APIs that will let developers build games, let you integrate with other communications systems, like Twitter, and maybe later to Facebook etc.
• Open Source allows the Integration of waves into workflows.

To see a video demo go to my blog at:
http://afarian.com/blog/?p=94

Wave is like a new version of an old bulletin board where people talked and replied to each other.
The live version (When people are online at the same time) is like the old ICQ that AOL bought (Do we still remember?), when you are typing and the person is connected on your wave on the other side, it shows character by character what you are typing (Unlike IM clients that just say "User Typing"). They will be activating a button that will hide what you type until finished typing it in.

Adding participants to an ongoing wave (conversation) is easy. Click and drag. The new participant can play the conversation and follow what happened in the wave, s/he sees it step by step. You can also make branches of conversations private so not all the participants will see it.

Attachments (Pictures) can be dragged in and everyone can see it at the same time. Drag & Drop from the desktop (Not supported on HTML 5, need gears for it). Embedding a video in a wave (ex: a You Tube video) is easy. But I wonder if they are thinking of a powerful feature that I am thinking of with this. (Hmmmm, I might develop something for this)

It has a blogey type feature, with commenting capability. All this can also happen through an iPhone and/or an Android OS enabled device. There is collaboration capability where the message that you send to multiple people, can be edited by others. When someone edits your message, then you get a message back showing the changes and who it is done by. Very cool feature and colorful making the change standout.

New participants will see the whole wave, then when they see that the document has been made by 2 people,  the user can press "Play", and the system will then play a video like step by step procedure of the progress and in what order these changes happened and who added what. (I can think of another powerful use pertaining to making demos, ohhh I said too much already). It also has a history bar that you can click and drag back and forth and see at what stage which edits happened (Very kewl). You can also specify one user's contribution by specifying the user's name and it will show only the edits that person made.

One of the most powerful and useful features for corporate users is going to be the fact that multiple people can be editing the same wave or captions or attachments while they are all live or connected to the same wave. Each person's edit shows the last word in a different color so you can keep track of who is editing it. Also the system works with other international languages, show at the same time other people can be typing in chinese hebrew etc.

Tools that let you organize waves.

Wave links: Are links that you click and drag onto a new wave, to keep them (like an index). It lets you interlink like a Wiki. You can also search through all the waves.

Extensions:
Cool Spell Check: looks at the entire sentence and based on the context of the sentence, spell checks and corrects errors, fairly accurately. Some of the errors it corrects automatically, and some that it is not absolutely sure, or are a little more vague, it gives the user a chance to choose. It is using a faux "language model".

Searching through the wave: You can search (from the toolbar) as you are typing a wave and it shows you the results in a small window (Very Cool) where you can take info, links or even click on pictures to import automatically from the search and put it in the wave.

Yes/No/Maybe: The Yes, No, Maybe gadget, can be added to any wave, (mainly invitation type) where the participants will respond, besides invitations it also works well for activities, or surveys.

Online Games: This platform is great because it tracks all the moves so it can be played back so for example you can see what the moves were during a chess game. It plays it as if you were looking at a video (Wow, another powerful application comes to mind for real world application using this feature).

Mapping: Of course the Rassmussens who are heading The Wave project were the founders of the Google Maps application. The interesting thing about this feature is that when the map is attached wihin a wave, and the 2 (or more) people are on the wave at the same time, every time one user changes a view, or presses satellite, or street view or zooms etc, the other(s) will see it, and then the other user(s) can do the same thing or make changes the first person can see it. Can you imagine looking at restaurants on the map and deciding where you three want to go. This can create a whole new Yelp! killer, (Ohhh no I said too much again...)

Rosey the robot: Instant translation through waves - IS THIS KEWL OR WHAT?? - As you are typing in English it will translate on the fly what you are typing into another language (and from that language back to you in English).  Of course it is translating word for word, so you will need to use some common sense. This can be done in 40 languages.

Polls (Polley the Robot): It is so easy to make a poll or survey, and it can be filled out collaboratively. Polly The poll robot, fills out the rest, it puts a poll meter also tracking how many people have responded and results.

And now the grand daddy of them all. Of course no company can do anything without doing something with Twitter. Google and the Wave are no exceptions.

Working with Twitter: (Twitty)
twave - Wave of tweets - tweeting waves, well you know what I mean.

When you are typing in a twave, you login to your twitter account, and then the list of all the tweets show up. You can go to a tweet from anyone on your list, and reply to it, and the reply will post immediately on twitter as a reply. You can also search on twitter then when you have logged in, it automatically shows all the tweets that match the search term you are looking for so you can reply if you want to.

Reporting bugs
Beta version (of course) Gmail is still Beta!!

Reporting bugs is very easy. There is a button that you click and it automatically reports the bug to Google. There is an issue tracker that lets multiple people get and work on the bugs or delegate it.
 

I welcome your comments if they are related to this article.
Support -at- Buildwebsite.com

To see a complete video demo online, go the my blog:

 http://afarian.com/blog/?p=94 There is an embedded video of the launch of the beta version by Google. It is 1:20 long, but it shows actual demos of the application functioning.

How to build a Sitemap so your site can be indexed quicker?

 of this would be the main sitemap of this site (www.BuildWebsite.com/sitemap.html), or the one on BlueGrind's site (http://www.BlueGrind.com/site_map.html) which shows an alternate method because it is a much larger site with many pages.

On this page, BuildWebsite.com talks about the features of the new Google Wave. This is something you will be hearing a lot about in the near future, almost like you hear about Twitter.