Google Wave

I love google Wave, I've played around in the beta a bit. Though I agree that it has potential to fail. It takes a little bit of getting used to. In the beta at least the extensions are a bit confusing at first to learn how to use. What I'm interested in, and what I think has the most potential, is Google's ambition to make it compatible with other aspects of the web...essentially plugging in other sites into wave so you can track comments and posts on everything you would like to follow. I think this would and could be revolutionary but as most things do, will rely a lot on the acceptance of the audience.

Few products get as much hype surrounding them as Google Wave did around the time it entered into a "invite only" beta phase. For Google I think they couldn't have hoped for a better reception or for better marketing as thousands of people all eagerly awaited their own invites - some even making it onto eBay for silly prices. The question though of how good Google Wave is remains, and whether it can be a revolutionary product. I have seen some people review Google Wave and describe it as being a disappointment after such a big build up to it. I disagree with that, I think what Google have achieved here is brilliant and I can easily provide two examples of where I would use it to prove how useful it is. Every year I like to be quite adventurous with my holidays and it often involves months of planning for those going on the trip. It's not always easy to collaborate using IM and Google Docs either as it's very easy to lose your place when there's a lot to plan. With Google Wave it's no... Read more

My first impression of Google Wave is that it has the potential to be a tremendously successful platform that revolutionizes collaborative communication, but its success relies heavily upon broad acceptance and general ubiquity. If any tech company has the power to bring something like this to market, it's Google, but I'll still be interested to see if they can pull it off. The videos promoting the product so far are mainly directed at developers, and they make the service seem quite complicated, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it's quite easy and intuitive in practice. On a very basic level, Google Wave translates the act of conversation more effectively to the digital space. Rather than creating a messy trail of emails, google documents and possibly even chats to search through, each conversation lives in one centralized place in its entirety. The implementation is clean and simple. It's easy to tell who said what and when they said it. There's a playback mechanism ... Read more