So I finally got my invite through and signed in to Google Wave. It was cold and lonely in there.

Hello, I whispered. Is there anyone here? I noticed a list of contacts.
Hey, there are ‘others’ I thought. But how do I know if they are in here also?
I tried waving at one of them … nothing. I pinged one of them … and waited.

Eventually I noticed that one of my friends had replied to me so I continued the thread we had created and waited for their reply … and waited. You see here’s the first problem with Wave in these early days. It’s impossible to know if any of your Wave contacts are actually online and connected to the service. It was only after careful orchestration that I was able to converse with a friend of mine and that was after a round of emails and a couple of frustrating attempts at synchronisation.

I’m not sure why I found it so amazing that I could watch my friend as he typed in real-time. It’s something I’d seen many times before and in much richer ways. Still, it was impressive. The main thing my brain had trouble dealing with was whether the tool was an instant messaging device or an email alternative. It’s kind of both but with disadvantages in both camps. As an IM tool it is very easy to lose yourself in the thread and just as easy to insert your new messages elsewhere which completely loses the thread. For the same reasons it is confusing as an email alternative but this is perhaps where it’s strengths lie. What I mean by this is that despite being a bit confusing as an email alternative because of the way it allows you to insert messages anywhere in the thread this is why Google Wave will become a popular way to generate collaborative ‘conversations’ that sit somewhere between email and more static documents. How many times have you filled your in-box with small conversational emails between you and your friends? You could have used tweets or IM but needed a record of the thread and also needed something a bit richer … hey, who wants to see this YouTube video of a kitten being shot out of a cannon?! If this is you then you are going to love Google Wave.

There are some advancements I would like to see though. As mentioned, being able to draft your messages in IM mode would simply involve committing the draft after a carriage return instead of pressing the ‘done’ button, which is a pain when you are used to using your keyboard. Not sure of shortcuts as yet. Maybe IM mode should also prevent you from inserting messages mid-thread to maintain its temporal trait. I’d also like to be able to collapse the thread like a Tree structure. This will also help people transition to the non-linear dialogue that Google Wave proposes.

Another major headache in these early days is the lack of notification that your contacts are online. I have found a couple of options so far …

http://thatsmith.com/2009/10/google-wave-add-on-for-firefox – Thanks Chad.

and there’s an app for your OS X Menu bar but you need to build it yourself in XCode … which was great! Grab that here … http://github.com/hiroshi/unofficial-Google-Wave-Notifier/downloads

Overall I can see that GWave will definitely become an integral part of my intercourse especially in business. I can foresee a BaseCamp plugin that will allow me to publish and maintain messages and ToDo items as a Wave with annotated screengrabs and casts.

UPDATE: It looks like there will be a Google Wave extension for synching Waves to Basecamp … and it will be called ‘Campy’. All the extensions so far seem to follow this convention with ‘Growly’ also allowing Growl style notifications of updates to a wave. Read more on this here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In answer to Seb’s question regarding new edits you can see if an edit is new and unread by the green border on the left side of the field. These tally to become the number of unread edits rather like unread emails in your in-box.