Google Wave is a new online communications tool that enables groups of people to edit and discuss documents simultaneously on the web. The Google Wave team says Wave is "what email would look like if it were invented today." 

However, because Wave is mostly a document collaboration tool, the oversimplified email metaphor can mislead new users. The initial Wave experience can feel chaotic and confusing, but use cases for Wave abound. Come on in and meet Wave.

Google Wave’s biggest downfall is how confusing it can be for new users when they try it out. Parody web site www.EasierToUnderstandThanWave.com jokes that heady topics like radiocarbon dating, neoclassical economics, and polymodal chromaticism are easier to understand than Wave.

The joke rings true because the initial Wave confusion is a nearly universal experience. The first waves you’re bound to receive from your friends and co-workers, fresh on Wave, will say things like "I don’t get it" and "This is weird."

The Wave tool is kinda odd to me too and at first it was notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you’ll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that’s evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a comprehensive user manual by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. Read more about The Complete Guide to Google Wave.

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Are you ready for the Google Wave? I am. I really hope that I get an invite to the public preview. I signed up way back when they first showed this off at the DevCon, but have yet to be invited.

Starting Wednesday, September 30 Google will 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 customers of Google Apps

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 Google says they will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.

So here comes the preview. This means that Google Wave isn’t quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, they have focused on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Those in this public beta will still experience 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.

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.

So get set to hear all the news and of course the trending topics on Twitter about Google Wave going public starting tomorrow!

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