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Thursday, November 19, 2009

Manage contacts on Google Wave

level : beginner

Okay so if you are here now, it's because you really want to use Wave. Indeed, Wave is all about interactivity, and that's why I suggest you add contacts to your Wave account.
If you were invited by Google, you should be able to invite your friends, and when they link Wave to their account, they should be added directly to your contacts.
If it wasn't your case or if you just want to have more than one friend (which I think you do), you need to add contacts.
The contact panel is the one on the lower left corner, under the navigation panel that we have previously seen.

To add a new contact, you must enter their adress in the search bar, right under your name.
The adress can be entered in two different forms : it can be @gmail.com or @googlewave.com. If the gmail account has already been linked to Wave, it will automatically be transformed in @googlewave.com. However, you cannot (for now) add someone on Gmail that hasn't linked their account to Wave yet.

The main difference with Google Wave and any webmail is that not only can you add human beings, but you can also add...robots. I will tell you more about robots later, but just know that you can add them exactly like your "human" contacts.

Yet I see you come...What about the "manage contacts" link? Well, for now, the link only leads to the Gmail account, so I suggest not using it, at least while Google Wave is in preview

Another question? Yes, I think you would like to know if you can group contacts. Idem, for now you cannot, but I personally think that Google will add this function, as it has been clearly requested by a lot of beta testers.

So, in short :
- go to the contact panel, in the lower left corner.
- enter the adress in the search bar (ending by @gmail.com or @googlewave.com).
- add the contact.
- the procedure is the same if you want to add robots.

There you go, now you will soon be able to start waving!

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