Last year we saw the announcement and release of Google Wave.
For those who didn’t get it: Google Wave is a Hosted Conversation Service. Google thought: “If email were invented today instead of 40 years ago, what would it look like?”.
Rather than sending endless emails to each other, Wave allows you to start a conversation at one central place and involve other people, yes even entire websites!
If all of this doesn’t ring a bell, have a look at: http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html
There is short video (2 minutes) that explains in plain english what Wave is all about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8wXnVRnYdc
You can get a Wave account through an Invite, just like Gmail at its time. I still have tons of invites left, so if you’re not on Wave yet and I made you curious, let me know and I’ll send you your invite. Invites can be received at any random email address, but I discovered that invites to Gmail addresses actually take longer to arrive! Once you have your invite, you can subscribe to Wave using a Google Account (can be a different address than the one your invite was sent to). If you don’t have Google Account yet, you can create one on-the-fly and you’re ready to go. In the end you get a new address within Google Wave, which, funny enough, doesn’t allow you to receive email… Your Wave address ends in @googlewave.com and it allows others to add you to their Wave. I use daepunt everywhere, but unfortunately daepunt@googlewave.com wasn’t available, so if you want to share your Wave with me, add puntdae@googlewave.com instead.
The first thing I came across once I got started with Wave, was the interface. The screen looks like an interesting mix between Gmail and Google Docs (a chaos I never got used to). Wave is still in beta, so try not to use it for life/death stuff. On the other hand: If you’re not using it for serious purposes, how will you ever find out what it can/can’t do?
We’re using Wave in a production environment, which makes us discover interesting stuff on a daily basis. I’d like to share a few of those things.
The first thing I immediately missed was mobile support. I have a BlackBerry and an iPhone and a I perform a significant part of my job on the road. Google Wave runs within a browser and there’s no mobile support yet. There are numerous non-official Wave applications for the iPhone, but I’m always very careful with that. Those Apps require you to save your name and password and after that, you have no idea what happens to them. No, thanks! I’ll wait for the official Google App, although you might wonder if your name, password and data are safer with Google…
Google intends to turn Wave into an open platform, allowing the whole world to develop my mobile BlackBerry/iPhone App. But until that day comes, you’re stuck to a browser on a PC. The smartest thing I found was a FireFox Add-On, allowing you to see your unread Waves at the bottom of your FireFox screen: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/14973
Wave is still work in progress. My browser hangs a lot and today I discovered that it’s impossible to “unshare” someone, after you accidentally added the wrong person to your Wave. This means you have to be very careful when sharing Waves. Fortunately there is a way to copy existing Wave content to a new Wave (so your data doesn’t get lost), allowing you to share your stuff with the right people. You will then discover that there’s no way to permanently delete your old Wave! Emptying it or stuffing it with bogus is the only way to get rid of a Wave you accidentally shared with a wrong contact. Be careful with sharing (especially with the wrong people) because this is also a way to connect people to each other, which may not always be your intention…
Despite these quirks I see huge potential for Wave. There are people who worry about Google’s influence on our daily lives and I think it’s important to worry about privacy. Yet, I think Google is no bigger threat than Microsoft and we need to consider the options here. We should choose between existing possibilities instead of theoretical, non-existing products/services.
All progress is achieved step by step and taking active part in new developments enables you to stay involved and up-to-date. I don’t know if Google Wave will remain to exist in five years, but I see potential for a service like Wave. And Wave being Open Source creates spinoff projects, allowing you to run your own corporate in-house Wave server. That solves the privacy argument against Google and I reckon we might very well be installing local Wave servers in SMB companies, which are currently dominated by Microsoft Exchange only, anywhere between now and five years…
I wish you all a happy 2010 and I hope we will continue to see beautiful developments!