Don't Panic: early adopters join forces to create Google Wave guide

by Jennifer Whitehead, revolutionmagazine.com 02-Nov-09, 15:00

LONDON - Google Wave may be difficult to get your head around but the message from early adopters is: keep faith and don't panic. After bamboozling many, Google Wave now has a user manual created, not by Google itself, but by enthusiastic fans of the real-time service.

Google Wave has been developed by Google in response to the question "what would email look like if it had been invented today?" But to some users, the answer Google has come up with is "quite complicated and tricky to get your head around".

In fact, a tongue-in-cheek website asked users to vote whether Google Wave was harder to understand than a host of complicated topics, such as radio carbon dating, polymodal chromaticism and vector calculus. Usually the other topic won.

To the rescue come Gina Trapani and Adam Pash, founding editor and editor respectively of the Lifehacker blog, which aims to give people tech tips to make life easier.

They have created The Complete Guide to Google Wave, an eight-chapter long manual that is initially being made available for free online.

The manual uses the format familiar to users of Wikipedia, and the idea is that other Google Wave users will be able to contribute to the manual. The authors, however, have said that the book - like Google Wave - is a work in progress and are asking for help from volunteer contributors to rewrite and refine the guide, as Google Wave changes and is available to more users.

Calling the book a "bold experiment in collaboration and public iteration", the manual will be available next January as a print book, with new editions following throughout the year as new versions and developments are released.