Google Wave Complete Guide

Got an interest in Google Wave but have absolutely no idea where to get started? Try out The Complete Guide to Google Wave, a new (free) book written and edited by my pal and Lifehacker cohort Gina Trapani and yours truly.

Google Wave may not be available to everyone just yet, but there's still a lot to learn about it and not that many places to do that learning. That's where The Complete Guide to Google Wave steps in.

Wave is a young, complex, and frankly incomplete web application and technology. It's also an ambitious project that has the potential to change how we work, collaborate, and communicate on the web. That's why Gina and I decided to pour our time and attention into Google Wave and pull it all together into this book.

We're calling it a book, even though right now its content is only available on the web at completewaveguide.com. It features eight chapters and two appendices, but we're going to expand the book as Google continues to grow and expand Wave. (In fact, anyone can help us do just that by contributing to the guide.)

If you'd like a more permanent or convenient copy of the book, its first preview edition will be available for purchase as a PDF later this month, and the first edition print version will be available in January of 2010. Gina and I are planning to release four editions of the book throughout 2010 to keep up with the changing face of Wave, but the latest version of the book will always be available and free at completewaveguide.com.

Check out the book's About page for more details on our adventure in publishing (including why we're self-publishing), or just head to the home page to get started with your Wave education. For updates on book releases and various Wave tips, follow @gwaveguide on Twitter.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave

Google Wave Update

9/29/2009 08:46:00 AM

Starting Wednesday, September 30 we'll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select business and university customers of Google Apps

We'll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.

Some of you have asked what we mean by preview. This just means that Google Wave isn't quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we've focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky.

There are also still key features of Google Wave that we have yet to fully implement. For example, you can't yet remove a participant from a wave or define groups of users, draft mode is still missing and you can't configure the permissions of users on a wave. We'll be rolling out these and other features as soon as they are ready — over the next few months.

Despite all this, we believe you will find that Google Wave has the potential for making you more productive when communicating and collaborating. Even when you're just having fun! We use it ourselves everyday for everything from planning pub crawls to sharing photos, managing release processes and debating features to writing design documents. In fact, we collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.

Speaking of ways you could potentially use Google Wave, we're intrigued by the many detailed ones people have taken the time to describe. To mention just a few: journalist Andy Ihnatko on producing his Chicago Sun-Times column, filmmaker Jonathan Poritsky on streamlining the movie-making process, scientist Cameron Neylon on academic papers and lab work, Alexander Dreiling and his SAP research team on collaborative business process modelling, and ZDNet's Dion Hincliffe on a host of enterprise use cases.

The Wave team's most fun day since May? We invited a group of students to come spend a day with us at Google's Sydney office. Among other things, we asked them to collaboratively write stories in Google Wave about an imaginary trip around the world. They had a ball! As did we...

Finally, a big shoutout to the thousands of developers who have patiently taken part in our ongoing developer preview. It has been great fun to see the cool extensions already built or being planned and incredibly instructive to get their help planning the future of our APIs. To get a taste for what some of these creative developers have been working on, and to learn more about the ways we hope to make it even easier for developers to build new extensions, check out this post on our developer blog.

Happy waving!