I just ordered this a few days ago, should be in the mail today.

Getting Real details the business, design, programming, and marketing principles of 37signals. The book is packed with keep-it-simple insights, contrarian points of view, and unconventional approaches to software design. This is not a technical book or a design tutorial, it’s a book of ideas. Anyone working on a web app — including entrepreneurs, designers, programmers, executives, or marketers — will find value and inspiration in this book.

37signals used the Getting Real process to launch five successful web-based applications (Basecamp, Campfire, Backpack, Writeboard, Ta-da List), and Ruby on Rails, an open-source web application framework, in just two years with no outside funding, no debt, and only 7 people (distributed across 7 time zones). Over 500,000 people around the world use these applications to get things done. Now you can find out how they did it and how you can do it too. It’s not as hard as you think if you Get Real.

Free Online Version Here

Video Chat Experience -- Take a seat and join one on one interactive video chat sessions with other Wave participants. For more info on this extension, watch their video or visit their website. For others visit @ Google Wave Extensions.

Yellow Highlighter -- If you’re a highlight-happy waver, use this extension to add a one-click highlighter to your toolbar. For others visit @ Google Wave Extensions.

Take-Out Gadget -- Use this for ordering out at the office, apartment, classroom, or event, and figuring out who wants what. The gadget optionally lets the admin set a countdown timer for the order, to make sure everyone submits their order on time. For others visit @ Google Wave Extensions.

Napkin Gadget -- Use this to doodle with your colleagues -- like a virtual whiteboard. For others visit @ Google Wave Extensions.

Phone Conference -- Click to insert a Ribbit Conference gadget to your toolbar. For more info on this extension, watch their video or visit their website. For others visit @ Google Wave Extensions.

Yes/No/Maybe Gadget -- Our simplest and most popular gadget. Use this to ask friends if they want to join you for a party, to get their opinion on a topic, or even to petition their support for a movement. For others visit @ Google Wave Extensions.

Image Gadget -- Lets you insert, resize and annotate any image from the web. For others visit @ Google Wave Extensions.

Likey Gadget -- Use this to give participants a simple way to express their agreement or disagreement with something -- a great way to replace long threads of “+1s”. For others visit @ Google Wave Extensions.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoVTu0Do8u0

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Why I Love Google Wave:

Simple - If you’ve ever used Google Search or Gmail, you already know how simple they build their products. Google Wave is no different, allowing the user to easily customize the project based on their needs. As long as you have a pre-existing Google account which is free – you can sign up for their beta at: wave.google.com

Free - Unlike Basecamp, Backpack, and Campfire from 37 Signals – Google Wave is totally free. At present day you need an invitation to create an account in Google Wave. Feel free to drop me a line and I’ll send you one.

Easy - Creating a ‘Wave’ is a breeze. To start a wave, you click on the New Wave button. Enter a title and initial message, and click on Done. You can then add contacts to collaborate on that wave by choosing them from your Contacts list. When you add a contact to a wave, you can give him or her full read-write or read only privileges.

Clean - The User Interface was developed with simplicity in mind, taking a look at the screen shot below you’ll notice how light and organized the panels are. Each panel can be minimized or maximized depending on importance within the project for you. I normally use wave for web production so things like chat doesn’t interest me since I use Gmail/Pidgin for chatting.

I decided that the best way for me to keep organized was by creating ‘Folders’ within Wave to separate different (company’s, projects, clients, etc). Within each Wave I added ‘Tags’, allowing me to do a custom search for that individual project. The search features still feel a bit ‘wonky’ to me, so I keep things organized by Folders since this method was common in Gmail.

Google - One word should really sum up this paragraph, “Google”. If you were living in a cave you might not have a clue to what I’m talking about. Google is the most widely used search engine that uses text-matching techniques to find web pages that are important and relevant to a user’s search. Since that time at Standford in 1998 Google has adopted the times and found new solutions for common everyday problems. Google’s model is simple, fix problems to help people and build effective business models around those products.

What I’m trying to say is, Google’s products have the ability to scale and become integrated among one another. Google has already talked about integration within Gmail, Google Calendar and Buzz. Only time will time…

Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009