Google Wave: My First Impression.

I finally got my Google Wave invite a week back and has been exploring it since then. So What is it all about. After the much hyped demo from Google I/O Conference, I would say that it certainly did't live upto its expectations. I should say that its underwhelming, but perhaps it has potential. But problem is, they have stopped letting new people invite others. So I have a tool that I can only use with the guy who invited me and others in my network who already have google wave invitations. Nobody else. I thought that It would at least be like initial  GMail Beta where I could get limited wave invitations which I could send to my pals and try it out. Not much of a Trial now.

So far I don’t see enough people using it to make the experience compelling, but I could sense something built on top of Wave become compelling. Wave’s killer concept is “the conversation as a 1st-class data type,”  everything related to a conversation in one place. The conversations can be e-mail, IM, phone calls/conf, face-to-face meetings etc. What people want is all their notes in one place. Wave is trying to accomplish this, by unifying all those conversation components into a single place. Wave is trying to address some of the social collaboration needs, by policing monitoring changes in an actively changing and dynamic environment.  So its all about "Unified communications" taken to the next level.

For some views and use cases check out http://lifehacker.com/5381219/google-waves-best-use-cases. A lot of things that people can do with Google Wave, can already be done with wikipedia or sharepoint. It will be interesting to see If Google Wave can stand up to the hype?

Image Courtesy : Meera