Google Wave, which began rolling out to 100,000 new users one month ago, has thrown a lot of people for a loop, rocking even some tech-savvy folks back on their heels.
eWEEK has noted some of the gripes, including the multiuser editing, which enables several users to edit a document at the same time.
This is manifested by hordes of frenetic cursors racing across computer screens far and wide. Help! Must. Have. Draft Mode! Or at least single person editing, a la traditional wiki applications.
While help has yet to arrive from Google in the form of some Google Wave feature fixes, LifeHacker founder Gina Trapani collaborated with LifeHacker editor Adam Pash on a sort of beginner’s guide to the platform.
Trapani, who has been forthright about her annoyance that anyone can become her Google Wave contact without permissions, is billing “The Complete Guide to Google Wave” as a comprehensive user manual:
“Google Wave is a new Web-based collaboration tool that’s 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.“
There are eight chapters:
Here’s what I think is great. Google Wave is an open-source platform, and in that spirit Trapani and Pash are crowdsourcing the guide content, which comes from volunteer contributors.
Having multiple users trying out the challenging product can only make a guide well-rounded. Trapani and Pash will edit, rewrite and refine the content on the guide site as Google Wave changes and improves and rolls out to more users.
An open approach befits an open-source platform. Well played!
Read it online all you want, but the preview edition of “The Complete Guide to Google Wave” will be available for purchase as a DRM-free PDF later this month.
The first edition will debut in January as both a PDF and a soft-cover print book, with new editions to follow throughout 2010.