Wave of the Future

I have gotten an invite to Google Wave and have started my account. I have only played with it for a while and still am getting use to it. It is still rough around the edges, of course it is only a preview of the finished article so this is to be expected.

Google Wave was first introduced by Google in May 2009, where they presented for over 80 minutes on its capability, including its various possible applications - an alternative to email, Instant Messagers and even a highly interactive collaborative tool for business and research.

Certainly it has some potential, although time will tell whether it will catch on. It will require a substantial marketing campaign if Google wishes it to gain a large user base. Many at first had seen Wave as an alternative service to twitter but Google have done their best to differentiate their product from twitter. Of course Google Wave can do sooo much more than twitter. The place where I see Google Wave perhaps having the largest effect is on users of boards and forums. Wave will allow users to discuss their interests and allow greater collaboration and communication between posters unlike anything seen on current forum websites.

Google Wave is not as intuitive as I thought it would be. Requires some time to get use to and I have found it quite laggy. It also requires you to learn some new commands (well at least new to me). These commands however are simple and should not be hard to learn. There some interesting extensions which could become quite useful to communication with friends and plan various events. Currently I do not have many on Wave and so I have only really tried out the more community/forum based waves. These types of waves add a new dimension to the usefulness of boards and forums, allowing simple editing of posts and direct collaboration in the wave.

For example I have been part of a wave discussing the various Bars and restaurants available in Dublin. One of the more useful elements of this wave was that in the first post there was a map gadget which had the same interface as the usual Google Maps however one could add points of interest to the map, in this case locations of bars and restaurants that you would recommend.

Example of a wave

Other extensions which I believe will be interesting are 6rounds and Gravity. 6rounds is a webchat app available in Wave where one can connect to your friends and do various tasks including surfing the web together or play games. Gravity is a business focussed collaboration app which allows people to build a flow chart of a process at once at the same time.

To conclude I have two spare Google Wave Preview invites which I will be happy to send to anyone who leaves a comment asking for one on this post.