I got my invite for Google Wave a while back now. However it’s only recently that I’ve started to use it. Why? Well you need people you know on Wave to make it a viable communication method (use those invites wisely). If you have a google mail account already it will look in your contacts and see if anyone you know has a wave account. This has so far shown me one friend, that’s the nature of invite only betas..
I’ve just spent a good half hour talking and interacting with my Cousin in the USA on it. So what’s my verdict?
I can see it has potential once you have a number of friends/colleagues/people you know on it. The ability to see what someone is typing and to interact and edit everyone’s text it certainly makes it interesting (think IRC if anyone remembers that). If you like social networking (facebook etc..) but don’t like adverts (so far no ads that I could see) this could be for you! I can also see this being useful if you are part of a work group, but then doesn’t google docs do this as well?
All in all, this is interesting, but one of its weaknesses is that you have to login to wave to check for new messages! I already have several email accounts I don’t need all this work to check for new messages, oh and the wave seems to slow my computer down. Fortunatley someone has written something called a robot for notifying you of new wave content (I’m not down with the terminology yet!!). Anyway add this email address to your contacts “wave-email-notifications@appspot.com” and configure it to email your main account when thing happen…
