Few products get as much hype surrounding them as Google Wave did around the time it entered into a "invite only" beta phase. For Google I think they couldn't have hoped for a better reception or for better marketing as thousands of people all eagerly awaited their own invites - some even making it onto eBay for silly prices. The question though of how good Google Wave is remains, and whether it can be a revolutionary product.
I have seen some people review Google Wave and describe it as being a disappointment after such a big build up to it. I disagree with that, I think what Google have achieved here is brilliant and I can easily provide two examples of where I would use it to prove how useful it is.
Every year I like to be quite adventurous with my holidays and it often involves months of planning for those going on the trip. It's not always easy to collaborate using IM and Google Docs either as it's very easy to lose your place when there's a lot to plan. With Google Wave it's now possible to thread conversations based on specific parts of a wave and can have almost whatever you want stored in it. This means that instead of having to travel miles in order to meet up and plan in person it can instead be done on an ad hoc basis where anyone involved can easily comment on any part of the planning at any time so that others will receive notifications of an update. I think the ability to do that in real-time too is pretty powerful.
A similar example is in the workplace, which is an example that Google did express themselves during the original video. The level of collaboration, with collaborative tools such as track changes, means that Google Wave has the power to not just track on-going conversations, but can also be used for online meetings and for planning of documents and specifications. You could create a Wave for a software development specification and this could be worked on collaboratively with threaded conversations taking place in various points of the document to discuss different options on some of the technical details. When the people working on the specification have finished a new Wave can be created from this wave with none of the original comments - you could then share this with a development team to produce it and then any questions they have could be raised and answered on the new Wave. Hopefully I'll be able to try this in a work environment to see how well it performs.
A lot of what Google Wave can do can be seen in the developer preview video that Google released several months ago. The purpose of this video is that they wanted the public to help then create an Open Source product so that the adoption of it would be more accepted which could mean more users. I did try some of the things they mentioned in the video with varying results. The spellchecker which is supposed to auto-correct some words doesn't seem to be active, possible down to the number of people currently using the system putting their infrastructure under heavy load - though you can click on misspelt words to get a drop-down box to pick an alternative spelling.
The video does also mention the ability to drag and drop into your browser window if you have Gears enabled, and I must say it does work well - though did not work for me anywhere near as fast as it did in their demo. Presumably this is again down to the same heavy load that has caused synchronisation problems quite frequently throughout the day. Saying that though I did manage to get a good test out of it by taking part in a 199 post strong Wave that had an amazing number of concurrent threads. It would have been impossible to come back and fully understand it later without the use of the amazing replay feature which is used for track changes as it steps through each and every change one by one.
During my tests of embedding content from my desktop I also decided to try a few other things to see how well they worked. To start with I opened up several Flickr tabs in Firefox and then dragged and dropped the photos into the Wave - what happened next did surprise me as it did attempt to add them - however they are now perpetually stuck trying to load.
The next type of embedding I tried was from YouTube - I'd already learnt earlier that day from a friend that embedding the OBJECT tag from YouTube wouldn't work but I remembered mention of getting a lightbulb next to the URL. So I copied and pasted the URL to the video and sure enough a lightbulb appeared. Clicking on the lightbulb then gives you the option to embed the video in the Wave instead of the link. In someways it's nice that it's not automatic, but I think it might also be useful to be given the choice as some people may prefer the video to be automatically embedded. Hoping that Google would have enabled this feature for other video content driven sites I tried copying and pasting a link from Vimeo but unfortunately it didn't work.
Being able to watch people type in real-time is actually quite fun and I think to some degree it does change the way you communicate as you can't really deliberate over what to say - you just go with the flow like a Mexican wave. So that is a perfect highlight of how contrasting the uses of Wave can be - it can be spontaneous or it can be planned and methodical. You can also adapt the interface to how you prefer it too with a very minimal amount of customisation - you can resize the widths of the columns, and you can also collapse various "windows" into the top bar of the site to give you more room.
One of the few UI options I think are missing is the ability to see which of your contacts are currently online or viewing the Wave - if you're in a meeting at work it would be useful to know once everyone is ready to start (though of course being able to join in as and when you like is one of the positives of this web application). Some of the UX options do feel fairly intuitive such as those we are already familiar with from other products and the ability to drag and drop contacts into a conversation to invite them, however some of the embedding options do not seem entirely obvious.
If your Wave column isn't wide enough you don't get to see all the available options either as they don't wrap or display any kind of indicator that there are more tools - because of this it took me until I was at home on a larger screen to find out that you could infact embed a Google Map very easily and it explained why my earlier tests of copying and pasting links from Google Maps didn't work.
As expected Google Wave also allows you to use similar search strings when searching your waves to Google Mail, etc. so that you could search for "by:me in:inbox test" and you would get a list of Waves by yourself in your inbox that contained the word "test". It would however be nice to be able to search within a Wave as long conversations can be hard to find the point you want - and it can be hard to see unread messages in some cases. You also have other options familiar to email clients such as being able to mark content as spam (obviously there ready for when it is one day fully opened up) and other such options. I did also notice that each Wave should have the option to start a new Wave, or to download the contents of a Wave but as of yet I've not seen this working.
So to summarise I think Google Wave is a fantastic product though I think it's success or failure as a useful product will depend greatly on the adoption rate of it.
UPDATE: I've been using Google Wave for a couple of weeks now and have found it to be an excellent real-time conversational tool too. The difference with this as a real-time tool over instant messaging is that (as mentioned in Google's video) it allows you to see what the other people are typing as they type which means you can start thinking about your response straight the way. It's this same use of Wave that demonstrates how close to natural conversation this tool can be. In one example I was having a conversation with a friend about movies using Wave and instead of Googling for the name of two actors neither of use could remember we instead went through the same process of naming films they'd been in just like you would when talking face to face. I find this to be one of the most amazing uses of Wave despite how incredibly useful it can be for collaboration. Again I must state that given the chance, Google Wave could be a real game changer.
Also, if you're interested a friend has detailed on her blog how to add the ability to embed HTML in your
Waves, I'd highly recommend going to check it out!
