DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Archive for October 22nd, 2009

The first wave

Google wave has been out for a few weeks now and its taken until now for me to get a preview invitation. Thanks to the guys at Anthill for inviting me and letting me into their inner circle.

First impressions of wave is that the interface is very easy and familiar. My suspicion was “If you know gmail then you know wave already” but I needed to test it out.

After trying to add a few people and getting no where I quickly realised wave was limited to a select few. It seems even those on the wait list wouldn’t be joining me any time soon. So there I was sitting in one of the most hyped online collaboration tools with no-one to talk to.

I turned my attention to twitter to see if there we any fellow wavers there. I added a follower who provided his email address and Wave told me that the “user was not registered, would I like to add them to my address book?”

From the address book, I could drag them to my wave and start chatting. I’m not sure whether wave has a bug in relation to adding people, or if I’ve exceeded my quota, or if its just me being a compete idiot, but either way it needs work.

So now there are two parties on the wave. It’s not so much “collaboration” but “dialogue.” From the reviews I have read, Wave gets chaotic and interesting when you have multiple parties talking at the same time.

“Dr Wave” (a character created for help) has provided me with a lot of videos that show me how powerful things can get but I want to see for myself. I’m forced to find out why I cant  add people and find the following article which tells me that I need to wait for a “wave” that allows me to invite more people.

Until then, I just can’t tell what all the fuss is about. That my honest opinion. Until then I will leave you with this top tip….

To embed a wave ino your blog, just add embeddy@appspot.com to auto generate the code.

Here goes!