Video: Exploring Maps in Google Wave

Google Maps has been powerfully integrated into Google Wave. Like everything else in Wave, maps can be edited and manipulated in real time and all other members of the wave will be able to see your changes instantaneously. Thus, the Maps gadget in Wave is useful for, again, collaboration; this time, you can share locations, routes, and points of interests, all inside the beautiful Google Maps interface. Watch the video below for a brief, complete rundown of the Maps gadget.

Google Wave acquires AppJet

AppJet, the company and creators of EtherPad, an online collaborative word processor, has just been bought by Google Wave. As announced on the EtherPad blog, the EtherPad team will continue it’s work, but with Google Wave.

A Google spokesperson says in an email:

AppJet is a team of highly-talented entrepreneurs with deep expertise in real-time web collaboration. Google and AppJet have a shared vision of how web collaboration can benefit users, and we’re excited to have the AppJet team contribute to the success of Google Wave.

How to Use “Aunt Rosie” the Google Wave Translation Bot

Google Wave largely appeals as a collaboration tool. This is really helpful for businesses and organizations who need to brainstorm, communicate, and bounce ideas off of each other in real-time. Thankfully, Google Wave promises to have a variety of tools available to make collaborating as easy and natural as possible.

One of these tools is “Aunt Rosie” the translation robot. Aunt Rosie gives you the ability to communicate with someone who might even speak a different language than you. Whatever you type is translated into the language of your choice. Here’s how you can do it.

How to Create a Public Wave in Google Wave

As a new waver, one of the first things you might have done was search for public waves to join in and participate. A public wave is a wave that is open for anyone to join. Some are dedicated to listing your favorite recipes, others in order to play a public game of Sudoku and then others are created for intense philosophical and theological debate.

You too can create a public wave for people to join in on. It’s really easy to create your own public wave.

5 Things to Do When You First Get Google Wave

If you are lucky enough to get an invitation to Google Wave, you are probably pretty excited to get such a sought after prize, but now that you are logged in to Wave, what do you do now?

At a first glance in Google Wave, you’ll notice there is a navigation box in the top left corner of the interface, a contacts list in the bottom left of the interface, a listing of waves in the middle of the interface, and to the very right of the interface, waves are displayed.

Make Your First Wave

If you click the “New Wave” button at the top of the middle column, a new wave will appear in the right column. At the top of the wave, there is a “+” sign right by your name. If you click this, you can add more participants to the wave.

In the wave, you can add rich-text, pictures, maps, and other media. You might want to learn some helpful hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts too.