Google Wave – First Impressions

Google links the Wave account to my Google Profile (not just me obviously). I guess that’s how my address is stevensreeves – not my choice but I’m quite happy with it.

Starting up there’s a wave with introduction stuff and another with an Invites panel and eight invites we can send to friends. That’s exactly the way they rolled out Gmail, a long time ago, so we’ll expect to get more as time goes on.

Diving in I checked out a couple of Public waves – there are thousands already – then started my own – “Is anybody from Scotland out there”. Within a couple of minutes a guy in Israel replied and we were joined a few minutes late by somebody in India.

Global – Social obviously works.

But there’s a lot either missing, or not working. Most disappointingly the drag and drop of files only works with Gears installed in the browser, or with Chrome – neither of which are supported on my Snow Leopard drive Macbook Pro. So that will have to wait.

Later in the day we used Wave in anger. I needed some help with installing new themes in our self hosted Wordpress. An IM to Marc got him suggesting we try out Wave, and for the next 30 minutes we did, and it works.

Quite whether it’s better than IM for one to one conversations I’m not sure. But certainly it has huge potential for many to many conversations. And maybe even for replacing Email in lots of circumstances.

The invitations let me set up frontofficebox@googlewave.com so we now can officially we contacted there and will try to make sure we’re on-line most of the time.

Finally (for the moment) I’ve just discovered an extension which adds phone and video conferencing via Ribbit. That’s going to take some working out, but I bet it’ll be exciting – Goodbye Skype?