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Gina Trapani of Lifehacker gives her breakdown of Google's new tool of communication
Google Wave is the future of communication but its ok if it takes you more than one try to understand the complicated web tool, said Gina Trapani, the founding editor of Lifehacker.com, a part of Gawker Media.
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"Google wave is the most exciting web application created…ever, ever!" Trapani said enthusiastically as she came onstage at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York.
"Do you remember the first time you looked at Google Maps and Gmail? It was so exciting. This is how I feel when I first used Google Wave," she added.
Trapani said that Google Wave, which Google opened to a limited number of users in September, is tricky to get used to at first. Wave is a tool that is not meant to be learnt in one afternoon, she said, comparing to products like Adobe Photoshop that can't be understood through just one sitting.
"Google Wave is a learning curve tool," Trapani explained.
Google describes Wave as what "email would look like if it were created today." This, Trapani says, is an oversimplified explanation. "Wave is more like Google email or Google Docs on steroids."
The service allows users to edit and comment about one document in one place, so this eradicates different versions and copies moving back and forth over email and the possibility of miscommunication.
"Editing a Word document is a very different activity than answering your email, and Wave conflates those two things into a single workspace," Trapani said.
The layout and design of Wave is "so bold, almost to an obnoxious degree," she added.
Wave requires HTML 5 and it does not work with Internet Explorer and unsurprisingly, works best on Chrome, Google's web browser.
For further explanation of Google Wave, check out a rather long (1 hour, 20 minutes) Google Wave video here below, or read Gina Trapani's PDF book: “The Complete Guide to Google Wave”
Watch Gina Trapani's keynote at the Web 2.0 expo:
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