Like everyone else it seems, after I saw the GoogleIO presentation of Wave this Summer, I navigated through all the links I could find trying to find a way to sign up. I mean, come on. I’m an early adopter of everything they put out for consumption, that’s gotta be worth a little consideration right? As usual no, so I put my name into the hat along with all the other Google-committed early adopters…and waited.

I read the pro-Wave viewpoints and I read the anti-Wave viewpoints. Each had good points, and each had “I don’t think they get it” viewpoints. And I waited. Waited for the day when I could try it out and form my own viewpoint.

Fall 2009
Rumors began to circulate that on October 1, Google would be expanding their pool of testers. Maybe, just maybe, my self-proclaimed tight relationship with Google would get me the invite I so desired, or rather “needed”. I needed to be out in front. If Wave leaned even a little bit in the direction of the positive spin, being out on the front in of this “next big thing” could be useful in so many ways. I watched my inbox throughout the day. Nothing. But Twitter had my answer. One of my co-workers had an invite! Know that there were 8 additional invitations attached to each invite from Google. Surely he could give one up! I begged, pleaded, and cajoled, and thankfully – he ponied one up. In my euphoria, I don’t recall if I actually promised anything unfortunate in return. I’m sure he’ll remind me if I did.

Again with the waiting. I continued to watch my inbox. C’mon Google, where’s my invite. Maybe he didn’t really send it. Wait, wait, wait. Still nothing. The conjecture engine on the Internet was saying that Google was hand approving the invites, and a few days later, reports of the “nominations” being released start to trickle out. Still waiting. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday….

Driving home from Columbus Thursday night, I got an email “ding”. While driving (yes, I know), I reached down to check who it was from…gasp! Google! It was the invite! I called my buddy Tom. “Dude! Check your email!” A few minutes later he pinged me back. He had gotten his too and I now knew what I was going to be doing that night.

The First Wave
“Look! We’re typing at the same time!” I’m almost ashamed to admit it, especially since chat clients have done that for years – but that was the jist of my first interaction with Wave. Tom and I did that for a while, getting used to the navigation, adding pictures and files, checking out all of the extensions, ‘bots, and gadgets that were available. Essentially, the digital equivalent of kicking the tires.

The Next Day
After getting my fill of the simultaneous typing exercises, I wanted to do something a bit more useful and figured that getting a handle on developing for Wave would be a good way to spend my time. I needed the Google App Engine so I went ahead and downloaded that. Then I chose Python to be my language of choice for creating a ‘bot (Java to me is going to become the COBOL of the 21st Century, but that’s a discussion for another time) and sat down to hook it all up. Aside from some Google instructions that lacked a bit a of clarity, the ‘bot was working a short time later. Satisfied with my progress, I put Wave aside for a couple of days to let the whole thing ferment a bit.

The Rest of the Week
So now it’s been a couple of days since my invite. Tolerance for the “Look, I can see you typing! Isn’t this cool!” comments has waned. If I could kick these people from my wave, I would, but “Delete” doesn’t always work. Overall though, I’m finding good uses for Wave, but so far, all of them are in the collaboration camp:

• Getting feedback on blog entries before I post them;
• Discussion of events or activities (hmmm, maybe a Wave hosted Windows 7 House Party!);
• Group updating of BC/DR or other “living” documents;
• Keeping an internal company list of people to invite to Wave once we have more invites to give.

One idea I really like is using Wave to operate as a backchannel discussion conduit. When I’m speaking about whatever the topic du jour is, having a conversation running in the background can help me direct the event in ways the audience wants it to go instead where I may be forcing it. Similar to monitoring for #hashtags in Twitter. Value for them, value for me.

But there’s got to be more. Maybe replacing Sharepoint as our internal “Knowledge Base”? That would be awesome. Like Twitter, I don’t see it as being a chat tool (at least a general chat tool. Discussions around a central topic, yes.).

It’s a given that Wave will replace our company group mailing list, at least once we all have Wave. Before Wave, we’ve had tech discussions that have lasted for days and have generated 100s of emails. Then, as quick as they start, they’re forgotten. Which is unfortunate because our internal topics generate a lot of good thought and content.

A few other observations:

Stability

Look folks, it’s not even beta software yet. Some options that I really want to work are grayed out. There are times when you can delete things, and times when inexplicably you can’t. There have been a few times when Wave has crashed, but I can count them on one hand after several days of decent use. And I have yet to lose any data (which makes sense as everything is saved as soon as you type it).

Offline

I’ve been able to do a few things offline which then get posted up to the cloud once I get connected. However, I have not tested to see whether anything is stored locally by turning off my laptop. My gut feel is that would be a situation where you would lose data if you’re not connected. If Google Gears were running, maybe…don’t know yet.

Browsers
Most of my Waving has been with Safari (on Mac & iPhone) and Chrome (on Mac & Windows). I did do some Firefox on Windows, and while it worked, mostly, it was the least stable of all the browsers. I may have to try IE just so I can get the error message.

iPhone

The iPhone implementation of the Wave interface is actually pretty nice. It’s a browser still (obviously), but done up to look like an application (you even get the cool Google Wave icon for the desktop). It works the same way as a regular browser does in that you see updates live as they happen (and even though I said my tolerance for people talking about that was waning, seeing it happen on my iPhone was pretty cool). Now if I can figure out how to get things into Wave from my phone (e.g. pictures), that would be useful. The File/Upload function doesn’t seem to work. If I could email content into a Wave that might even be better.

Public Waves

The few of these I’ve been a part of make me wonder what the purpose is going to be. In the current iteration, these public waves can fill up fast (to the point where they can no longer be updated) and the conversations so disjointed that no value can be extracted without mounting a full mining expedition. Some sort of sub-grouping or organization mechanism may be required here to help keep sense of things.

Summary

Wave will be useful. It actually already is even in its not-beta, mystifying usage model current form. The extensions and ‘bots will be part of what makes it a success, and being willing to change the way you think about how information needs to be shared may be the key to really exploring its opportunity.