After months of anticipation and waiting, I finally got my Google Wave invite the other day. In case you’ve been living in a cave this past year and haven’t heard all the hoopla about Google’s new techno-toy here’s the scoop according to Google:
Google Wave is an online communication and collaboration tool that makes real-time interactions more seamless — in one place, you can communicate and collaborate using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is a conversation with multiple participants — participants are people added to a wave to discuss and collaborate on its content. Participants can reply any time and anywhere within a wave, and they can edit content and add more participants as a wave develops. It’s also possible to rewind waves with the playback functionality, to see what happened, and when.
There has been some debate among early users about whether the Wave lives up to its hype. Some are blown away by it, while others are more skeptical, complaining about various problems that plague any piece of software that is in early stages of development and/or saying things like, "well . . . I’m on Facebook and I have Twitter, so what’s the point of having this, etc. . . ?"
Having played around with the thing, I find myself somewhere in the middle in that debate. Yes, it’s definitely buggy as hell. Add to that some of the bots, gadgets, extensions developed for the Wave by third-party creators simply do not work (while others are just plain stupid — Eliza the Bot Shrink, coughcough) . Yes, there is some lag so it’s much slower than instant messaging or chat (but it’s still faster than email). And, being as it’s still early and available by invitation-only, there’s really very few people to wave to.
That’s the negative.
Here’s the positive:
The minute I signed-in and saw what the Wave could do already, I could see the great potential for this thing. If not as a "tool-killer" or out-and-out replacement for email, then as a collaborative tool for project-based communication. Although, I’m sure this’ll eventually gain popularity with the common folks, the Wave is really a tool for business communication. Already, through it’s native programming and the addition of a few extensions, you can seamlessly (nearly so, anyway) integrate video, imaging and text in a collaborative way. I can see how I might be using this thing in the future as a tool to work with writers I’ve published. One of the problems I’ve always had is that when it comes to connecting with writers after a piece has been accepted, I’ve always had problems as I’ve been forced to use many different tools/methods for keeping in touch and have met with very limited success. This often leads to conflicts and misunderstandings. If I had enough of these writers using Google Wave, we could just send waves back and forth, discuss and implement revisions when necessary and keep each other informed in a timely fashion, rather than flitting about different communication platforms all the time. What I’m hoping is that, once the Wave is farther along in it’s development, and more and more useful apps are developed for it, it will become an even more useful and streamlined tool. One of the problems I had was integrating the Wave with this blog. I first tried a plug-in for Wordpress that was alleged to work well with version 2.8+, but found that it did not work on my blog at all. Further investigation led me to the conclusion that many other more tech-savvy users than I am were experiencing similar problems, so I tried an alternative method and got the exact same result. Needless to say, the really nifty demonstration for Google Wave I’d planned for this blog post did not work the way I wanted it to.
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