As soon as Google Wave was announced, the initial beta users jumped at the opportunity to invite their friends into the world of the "Wave." However, they soon discovered that they had no idea how to utilize Google's latest concoction, and abandoned the online collaboration client as soon as they jumped into it.

This isn't the first time a trend has died off as quickly as it was hyped up: instant messaging services were once regarded as unneccessary, since diehard email users didn't see the need for them. Fortunately, as soon as the the services began expanding their features, users saw that they were capable of so much more and eventually warmed up to the technology. We figure that Google Wave users would react in the same manner if someone would just explain what exactly can be done with the web client. 

If you're not entirely familiar with what Google Wave is all about, we should let you know that it's essentially a “hosted email” service, in which you can send messages to other users in real time. You can also have a large number of individuals included in the Wave with you, as well as install add-ons with additional features.

1. Keep in touch with friends

Just like email, instant messaging, and text messaging, Google Wave lets you keep in touch with friends and family. You can add photos and files that recipients can download, without any bandwidth caps.

The best part, however, is that your recipients can see you typing your message in real time, which means you don't have to wait for them to write the email and send it your way. Instead, you have instant access to your conversation, without the barriers and set backs of sending and receiving.

2. Share your photos

Google Wave lets you share files right from within a Wave, without worrying if you or your recipient will have enough email storage to handle the large files. Select the small paperclip icon in the edit menu and browse your hard drive for a file you'd like to send. Once you click submit, the image will be whisked away to Google, where it will soon be added to the Wave you’re working on.

Uploading photos is a lot easier when you have Google Gears installed. Installing this add-on allows you to simply drag and drop images into the wave without having to upload images one at a time.

Your recipients will be able to view the photos right from Google Wave. By clicking on any image, a photo browser will open, allowing you to view any and all images right in the browser.

3. Share files

Many people often don’t attach large files when they send emails because of Megabyte caps--yeah, we said Megabytes. Most (corporate) email clients will allow a 10MB maximum on any outgoing message. Fortunately, Google Wave has a better way. Files that are uploaded are attached just like photos, and can be renamed on-the-fly by clicking underneath the icon and typing a name. We especially like the simplicity of being able to rename the files once they’re uploaded.

The recipient can then download all of the files at once by clicking on the Files drop-down menu under the wave and selecting Download All.  

4. Collaboratively Drafting Documents

Before we began writing this article, we asked a few followers on Twitter how they use Google Wave in their daily routines. The majority of them replied that they like to use Google wave to collaboratively write papers, work on research, or draft proposals. Having a team of writers working towards a single goal is often more productive.

The cursors for each individual contributer will be displayed in a different color. While Google Docs does something similar, it does have the propensity to lag. The Wave is much faster and more efficient when it comes to collaborative work.

5. Trip Planning

Planning trips can be hectic enough without worrying about what to bring, who's coming along, or what the weather will be like when you get there. With Google Wave you can plan trips easily and effortlessly. Additionally, if you’re traveling with a group, you can easily share the agenda and allow others to modify it.

To get started, click Settings, then Extension Settings. From here, make sure that the Map Gadget, Trippy, and AccuWeather extensions are enable--these will be beneficial for trip planning. When you head back, create a new Wave, add your traveling buddies, and begin planning your trip.

With the Map Gadget, you can set a route to the hotel, beach, and any other places you might want to visit. Trippy lets you create a trip itinerary based on the location you’re traveling to. AccuWeather, finally, will let you plan in advance by showing you the latest weather. All of this information can be created, accessed, saved, and shared in one location where you can see your trip information at a glance.

6. Updating a website

Blogging can be fun, but a lot of people are turned off to it because of their blogging software. Google Wave lets you embed waves into webpages and update it efficiently without much effort.

To begin, you’ll need to add "embeddy@appspot.com" to your contact list contact. Embeddy will add a new message directly to the Wave you’re editing. This message will allow you to choose options for the embed tag, like width, height, background and text color and font style. When you’re finished, an embed code will appear, allowing you to copy and paste it to your site.

As you post to the Wave, the widget on the website will also be updated. If you’re using WordPress or another blog-like platform, you could essentially create several different public Waves for bookmarks and friends lists that you could embed in sidebars. The possibilities are endless.

7. Collaborate on a project

Google Wave is all about collaboration; an invaluable tool at best. You can embed files, images and gadgets to create a richer experience. You can also  edit a message in realtime while another collaborator is watching you type.

With the G+ button on the edit bar, you have the ability to search Google web, images or video and instantly add additional research to your collaboration. You can also add links, headers, and even more gadgets.

8. Take a poll

Google Wave will let you create and manage a poll with ease.

Whether you're wondering if employees will be psyched about the latest pay raise, or are curious to know who will be attending your birthday party, you can uncover the truths to these and more by using a Google Wave poll. To do this, you’ll need to make sure that the Yes/No/Maybe Gadget is installed by visiting the Settings > Extension Settings Wave.

Once you have it installed, create your Wave as normal, except this time you’ll have a new option in the edit bar. When you select the new gadget, you’ll see a large Yes, No, and Maybe? section in your Wave. When people click on the words, their picture and name will be listed under the selected section. In addition, a running count will be displayed under each of the columns.

9. To-do Lists

Many people use different to-do applications on their Mac and iPhone, but with Google Wave you can keep your to-do list in one place you can frequently visit. Plus, Google Wave will also work quite well on your iPhone (although this functionality is currently in alpha).

Just create a wave like you normally would, making use of font colors, size, bulleted lists, and numbering to keep track of your different lists. Plus, you can share your list with collaborators when you need to share your schedule or to-dos. We use a mix of bulleted lists and highlighting to mark our near-due tasks. When a task is completed, you can use a strikethrough.

To access your Google Wave to-to list on your iPhone, navigate to wave.google.com in mobile Safari. Once you sign in, it may tell you that Wave works best in other browsers, but it's fine to tap continue.

10. Goodbye ListServ, hello virtual bulletin board

A lot of companies and educational institutions make use of ListServs to share information to the individuals subscribed to them. Google Wave has a similar ability built right in without having to use an additional email server or service.

Simply create a new Wave, add collaborators, and use it as a virtual bulletin board. As collaborators add new content, the old content can get bumped down to create a chronological time line of digital information. When a recipient wants to catch up on news, they can use the Playback functionality (located in the edit bar when viewing a wave).

Using Google Wave in this manner shows the true potential of hosted email. Solutions like a ListServ can be brought into a new era and still maintain their charm.

11. Play a game

When you just want to take a break from your communication, you could turn to online social games, or you could also stay right in Google wave to play a nice game of Sudoku or Chess.

You can enable the Wave Sudoku game by navigating to Settings > Extension Settings > Install Wave Sudoku. Once you installed this add-on, you'll be able to enable it from your Google Wave inbox. To play the game, simply type the numbers 1 through 9 in the blocks, or 0 to return to a blank block. When you complete a game, you have the abliity to start a new one.

To play Chess, you’ll need to add a custom gadget. To do so, edit the Wave and select the custom extension button from the edit menu. From the Add Gadget from URL box, paste in:

http://gerculanum.appspot.com/gadgets/com.example.chessgadget.client.ChessGadget.gadget.xml

Click Add. Now you can play a game of Chess against yourself, or a recipient of the Wave.

12. Create a publicly editable Wiki solution

When you mix Google Wave and multiple HTML webpages and Wave embeds, you can create a fully editable website or Wiki. Sure, it’s not a wiki in the same sense that other wiki solutions are, but the pages will be openly available to the public using the Embeddy contact on the web, and fully editable to the users who are added to the Wave.

To do this, simply create a Wave as normal and add to it the list of editors. Use the Embeddy contact as used in #6 and embed the multiple waves (one for each page) into your website. You can then link to other pages that contain Wave embeds.

The best part of all of this: The Wave embed will update in real time whenever someone is editing the Wave.

13. Send Newsletters

Newsletters within companies, schools, or other organizations can keep people informed on what’s going on. Far too often, these newsletters are hand-coded with HTML and take too much time to create and manage. With Google Wave, you can send around better newsletters that can take advantage of rich, embedded gadgets, files, images and even YouTube videos. 

Plus, you can add multiple collaborators for creating and sending newsletters, so you’re not all alone when it comes to compiling the content.

14. Group Meeting Tool (with Ribbit)

Conference calls via phones used to be a pain to create and follow through with, but with Google Wave and an add-on, they’re as simple as typing an email. To create a conference call, you must install the Ribbit extension by going to Settings > Extension Settings.

To start a call, simply add the attendees as recipients of the Wave and have them enter their phone number into the Ribbit extension by clicking Add My Number next to their name and profile picture. Once all of the numbers has been entered, start the call by pressing the Start Conference button. After a few minutes, Ribbit will connect all of the participants and an Active green button will be displayed beside their names. The entire Wave will also be notified when the caller hangs up.

The Ribbit Conference Gadget is a very simple, but extremely powerful tool for people that rely on phone conferencing.

15. Translate Between Languages

Google Translate has been around for years, but when it comes to automatically translating between languages, software can be iffy. Google is presently working on a bot for the Wave called Rosie, but it hasn’t yet been released to the public. Fear not, however, as another developer has created a substitute that is just as good and still uses Google Translate.

To translate any email, simply add aunt-rosie@appspot.com to the Wave you’re editing. A tiny drop-down menu will then instantly be added to the message. Select the language you’d like and Aunt Rosie will go to work. Soon enough, you’ll have a new message in the wave with the translated text you requested. In our testing it worked rather well, but remember that it’s translating to the requested language. Aunt Rosie will detect which language it’s written in automatically.

16. Chat Room

Realtime collaboration is extremely vital for many companies and is especially important for individuals who telecommute for work. Some companies use chat rooms that will allow employees to communicate with each other in a real time space. A lot of the functionality of a chat room, however, can be replicated in Google Wave.

With Google Wave, chatters have the ability to send messages back and forth to each other in real time, but recipients can also backtrack to look at past messages, even if they weren’t online when the message was sent. The Playback function in Google Wave allows people to view a timeline of messaging history. But the ability to keep an indefinite log of chat history is a nice perk to using Google Wave as a chat room.

17. Customer Support for Companies

Good customer support is a must if you wish to stay in business. With many companies, users must dial in, stay on hold for an agent, get transferred to the appropriate agent, and so on. This communication might be convenient for some, but many people prefer the textual communication of email. If companies could start looking at the potential uses of Google Wave for customer support communication, then the whole market could effectively be changed for the better.

With Google Wave, support representatives could share information from the web, from a map, etc. right from the same application. Plus, support professionals could video or audio chat with clients, if that is demanded.

Of course, the biggest downfall for this sort of communication is that Google Wave isn’t quite “there” yet. This means that Google Wave users can send messages between each other, but not with outside email accounts like Gmail, Yahoo, or MSN. If users could submit support tickets using Google Wave, then corporate-customer communication could really change to become more efficient.

18. Take Notes

Google Docs is a great place to type documents, but if you want to keep everything in one place, Google Wave can help. Notes that are on a particular topic and contain multiple sections can be easily organized with Google Wave.

Google Wave features a good text editor that can be used to place bullet points, indentations and more into your notes. Then, when/if you need to share your notes, you can share them by sending other Wave users the notes, or by embedding them on a page for anyone to see.

19. Instant Messenger Replacement

Instant messaging is a great communication tool, but some may find it difficult to keep up with chat logs for future reference. You could potentially use Google Wave to keep up with all of your communications needs, even chats and the resulting logs. You are able to see the contacts who are online by looking at their profile picture. If there’s a green dot in the lower-left hand corner, then they’re currently in their Wave account. When you send a Wave to them, they’ll be able to see it appear instantly in their inbox. If they’re not online, they will get the message as soon as they log in.

Google Wave includes many of the same text formatting features as iChat, Adium, or other clients, but also includes things not found in instant messaging. Things like the ability to embed gadgets, games, and YouTube content. Plus, the ability to share files images without the need for pesky file transfer mechanisms that often don’t work well is a huge plus. When you want to refer to the logs, simply use the Playback function. The date and time is automatically included in every message in the Wave.

20. Video Chat

Video chatting from your web browser has been around for a while, and is available in your Gmail inbox, but just because you’re using Google Wave doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice video chatting. With a free extension, the Wave can do just as good a job as Gmail.

Start by opening Settings > Extension Settings and install the Video Chat Experience Extension. Next, create a Wave as you would normally, adding the newly installed extension to the Wave. When you enable this, you can add up to 6 people inside of a chat “round.” To join that chat, simply select a virtual seat around the table, and the chat begins. In addition to video chatting, you can also text chat using the input field above the video. The textual chat will display over top of the video while chatting. The video chat service and extension is provided by 6-rounds.com.