Google Wave: First Thoughts

I was lucky enough to get into Google Wave early on - I got my invite mail early yesterday, as did a number of other people I know. It looks like invitations are being sent out in batches, rather than as requested. The fact that a number of people I know are also in has given me a head start on figuring out what can be done with it - as with any communications medium, it’s no use if you’re the only one using it.

Wave is like a message board, but with better threading. You can see people typing in nearly real time. Wave is like email, but better organised, and with much easier use of images, links, and other non-text data. Wave is like instant messaging, but not so ephemeral - the conversation is preserved, and you can come back to it. Wave is like twitter, but you can write more. Wave is like a wiki, but it’s got a clean, easy interface, with drag-and-drop functionality built right in.

I think, to be honest, it’s something of its own thing - trying to depict it in terms of other media is like trying to use TV like radio with pictures. It’s a step onward, but it’s not how it’ll be used in the long term.

Thus far (a day and a half of use), I’m finding it to be a brilliant collaborative tool. I’m discussing projects of my own with four other people, and I’ve got more… useful data, I suppose, from it than I would from any number of emails. It’s like a very orderly conversation, where nobody gets interrupted, or forgets what they were going to say.

I’m certainly going to continue to use it as I’ve started, in this collaborative-project-discussion style, but I’ll be immensely interested to see what other uses people come up with.