On September 30, Google sent out 100,000 invites to their new Google Wave service. The service—something of a mix between a wiki, Instant Messaging, email, and a threaded forum—aims to revolutionise the way people talk and collaborate online. I won’t write too much about what Wave is: there are plenty of guides out there for that, instead I’d like to focus on my thoughts on the platform.
Google Wave is chaotic. Everyone’s new to it all at once, which means everyone’s trying out all the features, bots, and widgets all at once. This means there’s certainly a lot going on and it can be very exciting, but it’s very difficult to keep track of and it’s entirely too easy to break things.
Wave doesn’t prevent anyone from editing, deleting, or adding anything—you can add any bot, widget, or feature to any blip in any wave—and this has resulted in several waves having been destroyed. The Wave FAQ—a resource created in Wave’s earlier sandbox days—has been destroyed at least twice by the addition of bots by users. Other waves have been lost in accidental deletions, where someone attempting to edit a blip has accidentally removed text or features… and there is no undo button. You can replay a wave and sometimes use that to restore the information, but not always.
All of this freedom—being able to add to, edit, or delete anyone else’s blip in any wave—doesn’t just lead to accidental destruction but concerns about people “putting words into their mouths”, and raises a number of trust issues for many. Everything is version-controlled, but the version-control features aren’t as intuitive as they could be and don’t always help. Down the track I hope to see better version-control features, an undo button, and some access control. In the meantime all we can do is be very careful.
Another obvious concern is that it’s difficult to know what to do when you first join. The help and tutorial tools are limited, and if it weren’t for friends telling me to search for with:public I wouldn’t have known most waves even existed. Thankfully once you find waves like the Wave FAQ, list of Bots and Widgets, and the Wave Etiquette waves you can teach yourself how to perform tasks like creating your own public waves, create links, manage your Inbox, and “fold” wavelets to see what’s going on in a busy wave.
The collaborative features are great once you know to be careful, and it’s great fun seeing your friends typing in realtime (try not to start responding before they’re done, didn’t your parents teach you it’s rude to talk over others? 
). There are also a lot of very clever widgets and bots that perform useful tasks like sending messages over XMPP, or automatically turning Twitter usernames into profiles.
Overall the system has quite a lot of potential, and I think it will be a very good platform when these teething problems are sorted out. In the meantime, remember to be gentle.
P.S. No, I don’t have any recommendations to give out. Sorry.
