Wed, 14 Oct 2009 4:31p.m.
By Liz Quilty
Well I got my Google wave invite, logged in, looked about and wondered what I was supposed to do.
It looked very much like the Gmail interface but it had the titles on the centre column, and email on the right - only the email was more like IM.
I had one friend, we started a wave together, a wave is just another name for what appears to be email like threads.
Half email, half IM, so it’s like talking on MSN or something via email (am I making sense yet?).
I got bored since I wasn't able to do anything, and logged out and left it. The next day I logged in again, hunted about and thought 'there MUST be more to it than this'. What is everyone going so nuts about? What’s so fantastic about it?
To be honest, I was thinking it was a piece of crap at this point, utterly useless.
I think it was on the third day or so that somebody on twitter said to put in the search box 'with:public" which meant look for waves that were public. Ohhh hey! Suddenly I'm seeing all these threads that other people were in. It’s now much more like a chat room, only I can see when people type, live! My main concern at this point is that they will see all my typos before I correct them!
I found a few 'waves' and joined in with a few people that had similar interests.
You can drag and drop things all over the show which is kind of nice to do. I can add friends out of the chat room into my contact list, however I haven't yet worked out how to import or look for people from my normal contact list on Google Wave yet.
It took me a while to realise that the editing toolbar was way up the top whilst I’m writing near the bottom, perhaps it’s my big screen resolution? You can’t 'open in new window' so beware when somebody links to something.
You can’t open multiple waves at once either it seems, and there is no 'back' button so you will need to recall exactly what wave you were talking in before you click links.
Overall, my experience is that it’s not quite what it’s hyped up to be. It’s a learning curve and I'm not overly fond of those (who is?), though most of the documentation was good.
I do believe with time it could take over email and IM for a lot of people, however in that respect it’s also a bit of a productivity cave, where you end up so sidetracked talking that hours have gone past. Not totally unlike Twitter, and TradeMe.
From a geek point of view, it’s nice to use, simple enough for the non-techie and yet the plug-ins will allow a LOT of interesting things. I can see it integrating with things like Android, Gmail, etc very easily will make it far better. I look forward to more good things and more development.