Google Wave first impressions

Almost five months ago, I wrote here about the newly-announced Google Wave.

Yesterday morning, I received my invitation. I have spent a couple of hours since then exploring Wave’s capabilities.

The first problem I encountered was that I didn’t have anyone with whom to start a wave. Google was kind enough to give me eight invitations to share with others though, and before long, several of my more tech-savvy friends were online too.

Wave is both more complex and more capable than I realized. Some increase in the complexity of the user interface is an unavoidable consequence of the large number of features Google is trying to cram into Wave. This complexity can be a bit daunting at first. It’s also not immediately clear what Wave is for. I can think of several potential uses for it; but I haven’t run into them myself yet.

Farhad Manjoo writes that with Wave, Google is attempting to fix problems that don’t need fixing. He also opines that it’s not clear why one should go through the trouble of learning how to use Wave. I imagine that the same sort of comment was heard when the telegraph was introduced. “Who wants to learn Morse code just to be able to send a letter?” New methods of communications always require a bit of learning; and the more groundbreaking the advancement, the more adjustment people will require before they understand and accept the change.

I have a vague, and hard to describe feeling of anticipation when I use Wave. My gut tells me that Wave is the beginning of a new revolution in online communications and that what we see now is just the tip of the iceberg.