Google Wave at Intergage – First impressions

In the past few weeks and months you may have heard or read bits and pieces about a new tool from Google, known as ‘Google Wave’.

If you’ve heard about it, but are not sure exactly what it is, the official line from Google is; ‘Wave is what email would be like if it was invented today’. In short, I see Wave as a tool that combines email and instant messaging into one large collaborative ‘conversation space’ where users can come together and discuss and edit text in real time.

Conveniently, Google has created a one and a half hour video to explain a little more about Wave.

Google Wave is still available by invite only and is very much in a testing phase. This week the Intergage team received invites (courtesy of SocialTech Solutions) and so we’ve been experimenting with exactly what Google Wave can do.

My first impression was that the ability to edit collaboratively was great and if we’re being honest, great fun too. However, Google Wave was very slow when used in Firefox and unusable in Internet Explorer. However, it conveniently worked much more quickly in the Google Chrome browser!

We can forgive this slowdown for a product that is still in the testing phase and could revolutionise the way in which we use email and other online communication tools in the future. I am sure that one of Google’s main priorities currently is to decrease this slow down as in the longer-run the speed of this tool is key to its success.

Google Wave currently lacks a simple export option. The ability to ‘export at this point in the wave’ to a website page or article would be great. Imagine this integrated with the Intergage CMS – we are!

It will be really interesting to see if some whiteboard tools become available within Google Wave, for collaborative diagrams, although this might be more the domain of Google docs (presentations).

It remains to be seen what the security implications might be within Google Wave if someone you only vaguely know is participating in a wave with you, and they use a ‘dodgy bot’ to ‘help’ with the edits. This is potentially a huge security threat that one would assume could not currently be accurately covered by any security software on the market.

If Google take the time to listen to users and implement changes and updates quickly and efficiently, then I am sure that the Wave can be the revolutionary tool they are promising!

We’ll keep you updated!

Posted November 27th, 2009