I'm on Google Wave, finally

I requested invitations from Google several times, with no response, but then last week I got irate and told Google that I was their ideal tester, since I live in email and communicate with co-workers and customers in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. A few nights later, the invitation arrived. I got it on my Blackberry as I was walking from the gym back to my car, after work. Needless to say, I cut short my evening activities so I could get back to the office and join the Wave adventure.

Being a careful sort, I worked my way through LifeHacker's book on how to use Wave before I actually logged onto it. Once onto it, I could see it was completely different from what I had hoped for. I was looking for a way to integrate my online communication, which comes in via email, chat, SMS, Twitter, FB, etc., so that even though I have the ultimate email-based GTD system in place, there are a lot of messages (meaning tasks and projects) that have to happen outside of email.

Wave is actually a real-time document sharing and editing system. Imagine creating an article in a wiki and then inviting a lot of people to add to it as they chose, or you could do the same in Google Docs. Rather than creating an email thread, Wave creates a shared document. It looks a lot like an email thread in Gmail. The strength of this approach is that it does facilitate real-time communication among potentially large groups of people. The weakness of it is that it does the same, so you can easily end up with a lot of text and opinions flowing at a high rate of speed. Every time I log into Wave, I have to read through all the messages (think posts and comments in the blog format) that have been added since I was last on it. I could find only four of my friends already on Wave (and they must not be thrilled with it, since none of them responded to my Waves at them, meaning they are not logging on very often), so I have been participating in several public waves, and I have not yet gotten any experience in waving among small groups. Wave keeps the discussion arranged in an orderly, easily-understood way, even though the message volume and number of participants is high. For instance, the Software Roles in Education wave has over 145 participants. The List of Things Google Wave Will Kill wave has over 440. Most of these are talkative people with a lot of insight, and they all contribute multiple comments, so this is a lot of thinking to keep track of. Wave does a great job. However, the truly outstanding thing that Wave does is make all this happen in real time. You can actually watch the characters appear on the screen, as people type. (Some users have complained about this and seen it as a negative. They believed it made their thought processes too public. I would recommend that they draft their messages off-line, then. That is simple enough. I do it all the time in email so I don't send half-baked ideas in poorly drafted prose to people who need well thought-out ideas in carefully crafted prose featuring actionable bullet points. This is more of an issue for a work flow and writing discussion, and is neutral as far as platform.)

So, to conclude, after only a few days on Wave, here is my last post to the Is Email Better than Wave wave:

I think it is premature to attempt such a judgment. Wave is still in pre-release development, and there are insufficient users to test it fully. The basic concept of creating a shared, real-time, document among a work group is sound and will no doubt be useful, though this has been possible with wikis and Google Docs for some time. I think that as Wave is opened to more users, and as the slowness and other problems are worked out, the creative mind of the user collective will discover and develop uses that we cannot now imagine. 

If you are on Wave, please connect with me. My name on it is staffordpeyton@googlewave.com.