Catching the Google Wave

I’m mesmerized.

I spent most of today trying to steal time away from a dozen other urgent tasks to play with Google Wave. I was lucky enough (thanks to fellow Apache member Grzegorz Kossakowski) to receive a coveted developer preview account this morning. Since then I’ve spent a few hours trying to get my head around Google Wave. It’s still spinning a bit.

Google Wave is the search engine company’s answer to the question: “What if we re-invented email from scratch today, knowing what we know about email and the web?” The result is a amalgamation of email, web forums, instant messaging, wikis and file sharing. Google Wave is simultaneously all of these things and none of these things and it simply won’t make sense until you’ve seen it in action. Even then you may be left wondering if Google’s invention is genius or madness.

The feature that hits you right away is the real time nature of waves. You can see other people type their responses. A popular wave will, within minutes if not seconds, transform before you. My first taste of this was when someone replied to a question I asked before I even finished typing it. Even though I knew about the feature, I was still stunned by the experience.

All that live updating means that your inbox bubbles like some sort of quantum foam as documents are edited by dozens of people simultaneously. Where did everyone come from? Well, if you checked the “Please add me to the API support community through Wave” checkbox on the signup form, then you’re part of the infamous wave-discuss group. This means your inbox will start packed with a dozen or more messages ranging from helpful FAQs to “is this mic on?” tests.

Despite the chaos, I highly recommend joining the group. The frenzied activity is both awesome and frustrating. You’ll quickly see the pros and cons of the system as it’s pushed by hundreds of people. And for that alone, it’s worth bearing with the flood of information for at least a short while.

You’ll also have access to several very useful waves. When you first sign into Google Wave, do a search for “tag:welcomewaves” and read through the results. This is the community generated missing manual.

My initial impression of Google Wave is that while it’s like wikis and IM and email, it’s also very unlike those tools. The combination has potentials the individual tools could never quite reach. And potential is largely what Google Wave is about at this point. The client itself is very buggy. Expect regular error messages. But I have faith that these sort issues will be worked out.

In fact, the core functionality is so intriguing that I found myself forgiving and forgetting the bugs. And hey, this _is_ a developer preview. It’s not even beta! And when the potential of a product outshines all those bugs and crashes, you know you’ve got something special.