One Week of Google Wave

I started using Google Wave on Friday of last week and I’ve got some perspective now on this interesting new service.  I am of the opinion that in five years, we will hear everyday people saying “Hey, can you wave that to me?” or “Lets put some of these ideas down on a wave”.  There will be a learning curve, much like there has been with the adoption of any new communication tool, whether we’re talking about email or smoke signals.

Wave will save us time, help bring ideas together and produce more cohesive documents through seamless real-time collaboration.  Bridging the gap between private conversations and public messaging (i.e. Facebook and Twitter) will take years to come together though.  At the moment we use different tools to speak to individual people or publicly to the whole world.  Most of those current tools are covered in some way by Google Wave.  At the moment, Waves can be made public.  This may be to give the relatively small group of users on the system some people to talk to.  Without public Waves, It would be just me communicating with the person who invited me…which would be a pretty useless way to test the features of the platform.  If Google allows public Waves after the official launch, it will make an interesting alternative to Twitter or possibly Blogging.  You can make a public Wave about a specific topic and then let any Wave user add their two cents to the conversation.

Will it replace email?  Quite possibly, but the transition will not be perfectly natural for any of us.  It will require people to reframe the way they think about disseminating information.  When my online banking site wants to tell me that I have a new statement available, I get an automated email that I do not necessarily need to see immediately.  Would I want that message to show up in a new Wave or populate an ongoing Wave between me and my bank?  I might actually like that.  The pointing Im trying to get across is that there a lot of uses for email that could be ported over to the Wave model, but its going to be different and could take quite a while to catch on.

If you are someone who is waiting for your Google Wave invite but don’t necessarily like testing a service before its fully baked, you are going to want to wait a while.  The service is currently slow and crashes every once and a while, requiring a browser refresh.  Its a bit like the wild west right now too, because there are no permission options for what wave users can do with a particular wave.  Popular waves are often filled with gadgets and bots that make the wave so slow, they are virtually unusable.  In short: The Wave concept is solid, but there are still many bugs and performance issues to handle.  Permissions need to be worked out and outside developers need to get busy developing tools that can plug in to G Wave.  In a year though, we all may be spending a lot of our online time inside the Wave!