E-Biz Booster Blog

That's what Wave can be like, right now, already. It's that good and fairly stable.

Forget “save” and “send”

You are permanently connected. What you do is recorded instantly.

Well, it happens that the browser forces a reload or even crashes from time to time, but I never lost any significant amount of data so far. At most half of a sentence.

Which brings me back to my “guilt”.

I was guilty of running Firefox 2.0 in November 2009. The wave interface loaded, I even could click around, but — this is critical — I could not write documents and messages or call it messages and documents. We will need to create a new word for this.

(2) You will need a modern browser.

Google recommends Firefox, Safari or Chrome. (I guess you could Internet Explorer with the Chrome add-on). To be exact

• Firefox 3.5
• Safari 4
• Chrome (latest edition)

So my first task was updating my browser to Firefox 3.5.5 (what a change!) and I actually installed Chrome on my Windows XP notebook too.

Later I found this cool plugin-for Firefox which displays the number of messages in your Google Wave inbox. You can configure the interval in which it polls the Wave servers. I think I have set it to 50 minutes.

Tip: Only because you have tools available that allow instant connections does not mean you need to allow that you are interrupted any second.

Gadgets and Tools

• Inbox Status for Firefox Browser (↑)
• Waveboard for Apple Macs and iPhone (↑)
• Waver - Compact Wave Client (↑) based on AIR platform for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
  I use this one too. It's fairly amazing what this small client can do.

(3) How To Info

Every new technology comes with a bit of learning curve. The basics with wave are fairly simple to grasp. However, since this is a pre-beta-preview it can get confusing at times when you don't know if this is your fault or an undocumented feature.

In my opinion, all you need to get started quickly is this website:

The Complete Guide To Google Wave (↑)

I even wrote a short review of one of the third party provided Wave robots and linked to it from their Wiki. How cool is that.

If you are already on \/\/ave you can check out my Review of Groupy at this wave id: googlewave.com!w%252BU7_mO6ViG (↑). This short article also contains a link to a resource by Elliot Cable who explains how you can setup public or private groups on Wave right now. Yes, it's possible even without the final implementation of groups in Wave.

The First Impression Is A Damn Good One

I am still not so sure about rich text editors, I do a lot of editing and writing in a plain text editor at the beginning. And for some tasks plain text editors are the preferred way to go and will be in the future as well.

However, Google wave and its editor feels really, really good. I would love to see your face when you are editing a wave and all of a sudden somebody else on the other side of earth joins you and edits the same wave. You see how she is typing, she sees how you are typing. Then most likely you get into an instant chat inside the document.

So far wave is pretty stable. I cannot complain. Larger waves with more than 150 comments respond a little bit sturdy especially if they have a lot of gadgets embedded, but besides that you can really work fairly quickly. And don't need to worry about software crashes or having to save the document. It's all built in.

That's it, my first public praise and more to come.

There are tons of ways the \/\/ave will change the communication landscape for private and for business. I already correspond wit a lot of wavers who have pretty good ideas how to improve the users' benefit and to cash in at the same time. Since \/\/ave is a truly open platform I see opportunity almost everywhere. This is a game changer in the medium run.

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: No, don't ask me for invitations. I currently don't have any. If I'll get more I will eventually give some to my newsletter readers. Don't know how, if, or … no promises here. That means if you want one from me. Then sign up to my newsletter. Hurry.

(+) Google and Google Wave are trademarks of Google, Inc.

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