Google Wave: First impressions

I received my Google Wave invitation a couple of weeks ago and I have been able to experiment a little bit with it. As a lot of people do not have access to the preview/alpha version of Wave, it is actually limited to how fun/practical it is yet. Nonetheless, I have been able to play around a bit with it with my fiancée to plan our wedding, and a bit with the fine teachers over at del&bruk, the Norwegian equivalent to Classroom 2.0.

Negatives
It’s still very alpha in its nature. It’s slow, simple interface and many things are not at all as intuitive as it should be. It seems to pull a lot of resources from Safari and CPU in general as a lot of other programs appears to slow down, or stall completely (Macbook)

Creating ‘waves’, or discussion threads/projects or whatever you would like to call it, is a bit messy with its use of elements called blips, bots and widgets. Google has a job to do here. Purpose is a keyword.

Positives
The interface is simple as one could expect from Google. The placement of the various elements makes sense and is easy to create new waves. There’s an inbox, box for contacts, an archive and a place for waves. The ability to enlarge the wave window to fullscreen is a pro. I also like the idea of playback which is a feature in Etherpad. Naturally, the growing forest of widgets and bots is what will make or break the idea behind Wave. I haven’t found a lot of useful ones, but poll and maps are fun and Lonely Planet’s Trippy widget is quite useful.

The ability to see what other contributors to a wave write in real time is cool, but perhaps a bit distressing as you might be aware that others are “monitoring’ your writing and as most of us write/rewrite and make typos it can be slightly annoying in the long run?

Google Wave on the iPhone – wave on the go.

Some thoughts
My fiancée and I have started a wave to plan our wedding and it appears to come in quite handy. We get to collect all our ideas from venue, guest list, catering, dress and suit, todo-lists and even music (linked to a collaborative Spotify playlist!). Again, purpose is the key here. We have a goal – to plan a wedding – and instead of emailing things back and forth or creating a Yahoo group or a Google Site - it’s very neat and tidy to keep it in one place, which is editable, searchable and playbackable.

My colleagues and me have started a wave, but apart from the initial play and experimenting with the few options available it has now stalled. The main reason for this of course is a lack of purpose and time. Perhaps when it becomes beta and faster with more embedded widgets and bots it can prove to be a very powerful and useful tool for us. The development of Google Documents with shared documents, and now even more importantly shared folders, has made our workflow so much easier and more accessible in terms of communication and tracing correspondence and changes in documents.

I have one wish for Google Wave and that is for Google to embed it in Gmail (and later also, if possible in Google Docs) and vica versa. Google Wave Labs with options for grabbing info from all of the Google Apps available including Calendar and Task as well would integrate Wave better into the whole franchise.

I have a feeling this is where it’s going as soon as it is out of beta and more of an established collaborative tool than the preview we are experimenting with now. As it is a standalone product now, and not a feature of Gmail like GTalk for instance, it is not as natural to check in on the waves’ development. 2010 will be interesting for wavers and collaborative workflows.