User:Harrietech

In their first demo of Wave at the Google I/O conference, the project's lead engineer, Lars Rasmussen, and project manager Stephanie Hannon demonstrated how a conversation that starts out looking like an email, with replies going back and forth, can turn seamlessly into an instant messaging conversation if more than one person has the wave open at the same time.

Actually, the conversation is even more instant than instant messaging. Each key stroke by every participant in the wave is visible to all the others as it occurs. Rasmussen said this would result in faster communication than IM because you wouldn't be spending half the conversation waiting for the other person to hit "Enter."

However, he seemed to recognize that not everyone would want to communicate in this way, and said that a wave's settings could be changed so that messages are only sent after the user hits "Enter."

This live communication isn't limited to IM-type conversations. Anything in a wave can be edited by anyone who's been invited into it, including the original message. In the demo, colour-coded cursors, labelled with their owners' names, race around a document, all making changes simultaneously.

Playback You can add people to a wave at any time, in much the same way you can forward an email. But someone coming into a wave after three other people have discussed and collaborated on a document might not see right away how the conversation went.

To address this, each wave has controls to move back and forth through time to see all the changes to the wave in the order they happened. Every wave stores the history of changes that have been made to it, in same the way a page on Wikipedia has a history, making the playback possible.

Drag-and-drop adding of files Instead of attaching files as you would in an email, you can drag and drop files directly into a wave conversation. Google Wave's Stephanie Hannon showed how several people could contribute to a group photo album by dragging and dropping the files from the desktop into a wave. (She pointed out that HTML 5 doesn't yet support this function, and it required a browser plug-in called Gears to work.)

Dropping Word documents, spreadsheets or slide presentations into a wave could make collaborating on a project simpler than email, where tracking different versions of such documents can be challenging.

Embedding A wave can be embedded on to a blog post (or any web page) in the same way a Google Map can. Changes made to the wave are immediately seen in the embedded version. In this way, a wave can act like a comments section on a blog post or a web-based chat room. A photo gallery created by you and your friends can be posted on your blog for everyone to see.