Google Wave: Up and Running

Enhanced Communication and Collaboration

So far I’ve given you a conceptual overview of some of the key elements of conversations in Google Wave. Now I’d like to review some of the elements that enhance the way participants can communicate and collaborate in a wave.

Media

As you know, the Web has evolved to the point where it is easy to access and distribute various types of media as part of our online communications. The Web has become a lot more visual, and most users, including myself, rely on media, such as images, to enhance and improve our communications with other. So, it should come as no surprise that Google Wave includes the ability to share various types of media in waves.

As of the writing of this book, two types of media, images and movies, can be included as inline content in a blip in the Google Wave Client. Audio is not yet supported, although it can be included in a wave as an attachment (see the section Attachments).

Although other wave clients that natively support other types of media as inline content may emerge, the Google Wave Client allows participants to add most of the popular image types to a blip, including PNG, GIF, and JPEG (see Figure 2-6). Video itself is not natively supported per se, but videos from other sites, including YouTube (which utilizes the Flash Video format), can be embedded in a blip.

Figure 2-6. Sharing photos in a blip in the Google Wave ...