Riding the Google Wave - Gareth van Zyl, itp

Google Wave, it’s one of the most anticipated online collaboration tools out there; so,you can understand how glad I was to receive an invite to use it. At first, I couldn’t use it to communicate with anybody else, as the ability to invite others is invite others is initially put on hold for a few new users of Google Wave.

This week however, my ‘Wave’ came to life.Suddenly, I could converse with others and invite others too.So, off I went, and off the bat,I had quite a bit of fun with it.

Firstly,here’s the things I like about it.It’s a bit like Google Chat, only better, in so far as you can chat with others and see what they’re typing as they’re typing (if you’re not a great typist, you might want to consider touching up your typing skills).

What I also like about it is the ability to drag and drop photos and files into your wave whilst chatting, and then having the option to click on the photos in particular to see them in a lightbox type effect.

It’s also nice that you can have a chat with 3 or more people in a wave, and by using the ‘playback’ feature you can trackback your conversations up to a certain point, in what is a kind of replay mode.

In terms of organisation, you can arrange your waves into certain folders for certain reference.You can also add tags to waves whereby you can orgnise your waves into certain caregories.There are even a number of shortcut keys one can use to navigate one’s way through your waves, and by doing such searches as ‘with public’you can see numerous public waves that you can engage