Okay, so I finally got around to checking out Google Wave today. I have had the invitation sitting in my inbox for a while now and just haven’t had a free moment to check it out until today. My first impression of it wasn’t all that great until I was able to wrap my head around the big picture. I will be the first to admit that I am still learning all of the bells and whistles so bear with me…
The first thing I noticed when I logged in was that it’s an actual live conversation, as opposed to email which is lot less dynamic in theory. Some of my friends from the Central Arkansas Refresh community (Keith Crawford, Bryan Jones, Rob McBryde, Arlton Lowry, and Greg Henderson) had already included me in a few waves that they had going so I jumped in to see if I could get the hang of it without actually watching the tutorials or reading anything. Not so much…
Spend a Few Minutes and Get Up to Speed…
One of the first things I did out of the box was stick my reply in the wrong place and it hosed up the whole works. No, I didn’t really hose up the works, but for someone as OCD as me, it was devastating. It took me a few minutes to learn how to properly reply in between waves, and watching this video on YouTube sure helped out a lot too…
The Playback Feature is Cool…
One feature that I really think is neat is the playback feature, it allows you to get up to speed a lot faster than you normally would if you were working with email that was being passed around between several different people, all replying to various elements of a communication.
Sluggish Out of the Box…
As you might expect, Wave is not perfect in it’s current state, there are some bugs naturally. One of the things that I noticed was that in Firefox I kept having issues w/ the page refreshing or getting locked up. Someone suggested that I try Google Chrome and immediately that seemed to help out w/ the performance issues I was having.
Final Thoughts…
I am still playing around with the application right now, and have only spent a grand total of 30 minutes with it so far, but my initial thoughts were that Google is going to face an uphill battle rolling this solution out to the general public. For the most part I think that our clients find email to be intuitive and easy to get up and running with out of the box. With Wave, it’s going to be a lot different. I’m not saying that I am a genius by any means but I can usually take a web application that I have never seen before and get up to speed with it pretty quickly, without having to watch a tutorial or read a manual. I honestly had to take a step back and wrap my head around wave.
Now, do I think it’s a viable product? Heck yes, I think it’s going to definitely find it’s place into our daily lives at some point, when I am not sure. In the business realm we are looking for ways to increase efficiency and boost productivity. Since Google Wave resembles a conversation more than it does an email, I think it’s going to relevant for sure. I am anxious to see what the future holds for this product…
What is Google Wave?
If you are curious as to what in the world I am talking about, Google Wave is the latest tool from Google that is currently in preview mode right now for people to try out. You have to have an invite to get into to try the software right now, I am not for sure how much longer that is going to be the case. Here’s an explanation of Wave that I found on Google’s website:
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
By the way, if you are currently using Google Wave, you can connect to me at: [email protected].
How do you get a google wave account? Do I have to be invited? If so, my google account is [email protected] :).
Thanks for the good review.
It's by invitation only right now, I think they only sent out a select few on the front end. I thought that I could send out invitations from my account but apparently I have the preview version and can't do invitations. You are more than welcome to come hangover some evening and I will show you mine. It's pretty neat…
Google has done it again I guess. I can see so many applications for the members of our industry and sports groups.
P.s. If anyone has an extra invitation I would appreciate it. danielmorel [at] gmail.com
If I had an invite I would send you one, unfortunately I have the preview version and I can't send invites. Maybe someone will see this and send you one, otherwise you can request one from Google's site. I have no idea as to how long it takes to get one once you request it though.
Daniel, I just saw your post and sent you a Google Wave invitation. It will take a few days before they invite you. Here's some information directly from Google about the Wave invitation process:
“Google Wave is more fun when you have others to wave with, so please nominate people you would like to add. Keep in mind that this is a preview so it could be a bit rocky at times.
Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.
Happy waving! “