If you want an explanation of what Google Wave is, here is a YouTube video put together that does a pretty good job.
I was fortunate to be one of the first round of 100,000 people invited to Google Wave on September 30.
The first round got 8 additional invites to send out, making the total number of users over 900,000.
I have had enough time to work with Google Wave to share my first impressions of the service.
The Bad Stuff
The first thing you need to know about Google Wave is that you need friends. By friends, I don't mean acquaintances. I mean people with whom you work. You will find that acquaintances will not really Wave with you and use the service to its full potential. Wave gets most of its value from its collaborative nature.
You can only use Google Wave on a browser. Unlike Twitter, Facebook, or any number of social media tools out there, Google Wave is all HTML, designed to run entirely on a web browser.
This makes using Wave painfully slow on an iPhone or Android phone.
Google Wave is the Wild West. It is very easy for a wave to become a wild tangle of conversations.
As everybody starts to figure out how Wave works, there is currently no Wave etiquette to guide us on how to run our interactions. Watch out for wild tangents.
If you are a die-hard Outlook user, I do not see you making the change. In my experience, folks who live off Outlook are not willing to use cloud-based services if they can avoid it.
Google Wave is currently buggy on smart phones.
Although Google Wave does work on Android and iPhones, it is too much for the devices. This makes them slow as a way to interface with the service.
Google Wave is not email. At least, it is not email in the way we know it. Although it works like email, it does not interact with regular email at all. Both sender and receiver(s) have to be on Wave.
This will slow down adoption of the service by the public.
The Good Stuff
Google Wave turned out to be what I expected, more or less.
I still think it will change the way people work together, even with the unique peculiarities that come with it. Google Wave simply does what email, chat, and collaboration tools do, all in one package.
Google Wave allows you to create public waves, which function more or less like message boards. Anybody on the platform can join in without being added by one of the members.
If you are using Google Docs for collaborative word processing, you are better off with Wave. The Google Docs word processing service is much slower on collaboration than Wave.
You can simply work collaboratively on a Google Wave and then copy and paste the document into Google Docs.
Waves within Waves. You can put a wave inside another to organize them. Let's just say that it is quite simply awesome.
Linking from one Wave to another makes for great project management and organization.
Overall Impression
My first impression is that Google Wave will absolutely change the way people collaborate and communicate online.
On the other hand, I do recognize that there is a large segment of email users who will not take kindly to Google Wave.
After all, email has worked well enough for the last 40 years, and in a world of PDFs, we still use faxes.
The whole concept behind the design of Google Wave is, what would email look like if it were invented today? Google hit a home run on this one.
Unfortunately, once the service becomes public in 2010, it will take time to be understood and adopted.
It took Twitter two years to start going mainstream; expect Wave to take at least that long if not longer.
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