Seems anyone who visits my social media landing page, That’s Justin, asks me, how they hell do you manage it all.  Honestly, I don’t know.  It’s a bit distressing at time but I wouldn’t give it up for the world.  I’ve made so many wonderful connections, received job offers, sold prints, purchased goods, gotten better service and more all simply by using social media sites.

Here’s one of the newest.  Google Wave.  It seems the biggest question around Google Wave is, what is it, followed by, how do you use it.

Google Wave is essentially online collaboration, email, bulletin board, instant messaging and more all wrapped into one.  Right now I think we’re all still figuring out how to best use the service but I have a handful of ideas in my head!

I admit the service is pretty overwhelming but here are a few tips that make it usable for me.

The first thing you might want to do create a few saved searches, these are three I couldn’t live without.

creator:me -is:note:

This search shows all the notes/waves I created

onlyto :me is:unread:

This search shows all the notes/waves that are to me and are still unread.

with:me is:unread:

This search shows all the notes/waves that I am a direct participant in and are unread

Another quick tip, to end an input session, instead of clicking the “Done” button, try this keyboard shortcut

Shift + Enter

You can use the same shortcut to enter a reply to the last post in the wave.

Control + E will edit a post.

Save a lot of time, speed up collaboration!

That’s about it for now.  As I come across really helpful Google Wave tricks/tips, I’ll share them.  Maybe I’ll just embed a wave into my blog, that sounds like a great idea!

Right now, the de-facto Google Wave guide is, in fact, The Complete Guide to Google Wave by Gina Trapani.

What are your thoughts/tips/tricks/etc? Leave ’em in the comments!