I recently was fortunate enough to acquire an invitation to the Google Wave preview. It is still invitation-only (and no, I don’t have any invites – yet), so unfortunately you can’t just go and sign up right now. If you’re patient enough, you can get your hands on an invite also – I see quite a few invites being handed out all the time on Twitter if you want to try there.
So, what do I think? Well, once all of the kinks are worked out, it can (and probably will, knowing Google) be an extremely powerful tool for everything from businesses to individuals to collaborate on everything from presentations to documents to planning trips and sharing photos.
First I’ll talk about the bad.
- When there are several people in a single wave, things are pretty hard to keep track of if they’re all updating at once. It also seems to slow the browser down to a crawl while it tries to keep up with everything coming in. A search for “with:public” at the height of activity will also slow things down a bit.
- There is no way to prohibit replies or remove someone from a wave. There is no rights management of any sort. I’m sure Google has this on their list of things to do to make Google Wave better, but for right now, it is nonexistent.
- Lots of gadgets in a wave will bog things down. I found one public wave where everyone was sharing their Twitter usernames. There are 26 maps from what I could tell. One for a username starting with each letter of the alphabet. With that many maps, my machine couldn’t load the entire wave, and none of the map gadgets showed up.
It’s possible that my machine just couldn’t handle some of these things, but I don’t think so – I’m on a MacBook Pro with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of RAM. I have decent bandwidth, so that shouldn’t be an issue either. I’ve seen some tweets about people disliking Google Wave’s performance, so I’m sure that is being worked on as well.
The good:
- Again, I see a ton of potential for this to be huge. When people get a grip on what all they can do with this tool, and Google finally opens it up to the general public, it’ll grow.
- Google is encouraging development by 3rd parties, much like they did with Google Maps. They want people to be able to do anything with this tool. There are already some pretty nifty gadgets available, and people are writing ‘bots’ to do some cool stuff like converting lazy people’s text speak to real English to keep things cleaned up.
Have you been able to get in on Google Wave? What do you think about it? Let me know in the comments!
Jonathan is a self-proclaimed geek who likes pretty much anything tech-related. He is especially into Linux, but is interested in Apple and Microsoft tech as well. Jonathan is also into a little bit of gaming - he owns a PS3 and a Wii, but with his limited budget only owns a handful of games for both consoles.
For money, Jonathan works at a large engineering firm. He works in a datacenter as part of a group of 3 managing about 200 servers (and growing!), most Microsoft, some Linux and about half are virtualized using VMware.
I’ve had performance issues on Wave, though I’m very sure it’s my internet connection. At home, editing any sort of wave is a big problem because everything has a several second delay on it. At school however, our PC’s and Mac’s, though much weaker then my computer, can easily skim through a 100+ blip Wave in a few seconds. Hopefully they get this kind of stuff fixed, or begin adding speed changes, like being able to turn off high-bandwidth things that kill my wifi.
On the topic of interesting things to do with Wave, try getting a few people together and play some Monopoly. Me and 2 of my friends have a pretty heated Monopoly game going, and we also use Wave to manage fundraising for our Robotics team. It’s an awesome tool.