Google Wave: A Guide for Dummies

The social media world is buzzing again today with the announcement of Google’s latest addition to its family of products, ‘Google Wave’. Google Wave is set to be a new real-time communication platform that will be thrust upon us in the latter part of 2009. Let’s try and summarise this in a nutshell:

What is Google Wave?

Google Wave is a ‘real-time communication platform’. It is a Web 2.0 ‘mash-up’ of instant messaging, E-mail, web chat, wiki’s, project management and social networking. As such, all of these features have been neatly combined into one delicious melting pot. It stimulates discussion between individuals and provides an easy mechanism to create groups and exchange files and social activity. Without going into too much detail, there are a bunch of really innovative and neat features including a real-time view of friends’ activity (as they type!), the ability to embed waves (waves are threads of conversation) on external blogs and websites, a range of ‘pseudo-Facebook’ applications and extensions, wiki functionality, an open source code base, auto-correction of spelling and file sharing. These are to name but a few.

Google Wave Terminology

Ok, so you just managed to get to grips with Twitter, Tweeting, Tweets and the terminology associated with the global ‘Twittersphere’. This guide is designed to give you a brief example of the terminology used in conjunction with Google Wave. Here goes:

Waves

Waves are specific threads of conversation

Wavelet

A Wavelet is a subset of a conversation thread (A Wave)

Blip

This is like a miniature Wavelet or an individual message

Robots

Robots are automated participants that talk to users and interact with Waves

Embedded Wave

This is a Wave that can be embedded on an external website or blog

Wave Gadgets

Wave gadgets are fully functioning applications designed to enhance the look and feel of Waves. As such, this only serves to provide a sparse introduction as to the potential capability of this component of the Google Wave technology. For starters, any IGoogle or OpenSocial application can be utilised in conjunction with Google Wave. In short, there are an expansive plethora of applications readymade to work alongside Google’s latest toy. In addition, gadgets can be built within the Google Wave infrastructure and shared amongst multiple users, think Mafia Wars on Facebook but bigger and better. This provides ample scope for the creation of interactive quizzes and games that can be enjoyed by networks of friends.

Wave Robots

Robots are the equivalent of having an automated participant within your Wave. Robots are capable of modifying information within waves, interacting with users, communicating with other waves and extracting useful information such as links from external sources. Robots actually behave like users and you can define the behaviour of a robot based on the content of chat activity. This all opens the door to some really sophisticated robots in the future. If you’re interested in looking at Robots that are already available check out Debuggy, Stocky and Tweety.

Wave Embeds

This is like embedding a YouTube video on a website, but slightly more complex. Essentially, they allow you to embed Google Wave videos onto external applications but with the advantage of some increased functionality. One potential possibility is that these embeds will provide a real-time replacement to static comments. If Google can crack this nut, YouTube comments could be replaced in the future with Waves. Watch this space for details...