Trying Out Google Wave

I recently got invited to Google Wave — thanks Alex! — and surprisingly, another of my friends also made the cut, so we've been trying out Google Wave. Here are my thoughts on how it works.

The first thing you see when you log onto Google Wave are two waves in your Inbox: one to introduce you to Google Wave and one to invite friends and colleagues to Google Wave. Clicking on the introduction wave presents you with Dr. Wave from Google Labs who gives a brief introduction to the layout, along with a couple of introductory videos that explain how to use some of the features as well as some example waves.

David then created a couple of waves to which he invited me. A wave is essentially a document where you can add replies, which are essentially inline comments with a discussion feature, and add some widgets through the extensions feature. For example, one of the demo waves has a couple of participants planning a BBQ and they added a yes/no/maybe widget to see who could make it to the BBQ.

Another cool feature is the history control, which is very reminiscent of the time slider in OpenSolaris, which allows moving through the history of a document.

So far, it seems pretty promising and for a lot of things, it beats having a wiki — especially the horrible wiki implementation in TRAC — since there are inline comments and no weird markup language to learn. Heck, even my friend who's in mechanical engineering was able to figure it out, so it's pretty easy to use too!