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.
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