Playing with Google Wave…

By now you’ve probably heard of Google Wave. It’s a new “collaboration tool” from Google designed to replace email some day… or something like that. Right now, to me, it just feels like a cross between threaded instant messaging, a multi-user forum, email, twitter, a chat room…

I’ve used instant messaging (IM) for years and years now, since 1996 when ICQ was your internet pager and AOL was just opening AIM up to people outside of the AOL network. Then came Yahoo IM. Now I use IM inside of Gmail with Google-Talk and AIM buddies only. My phone uses BeeJive to connect to AIM, Yahoo and Google-Talk. I use Twitter to chat with people too, many of them I don’t know very well, and I think an advantage of Twitter is you’re not expected to keep a conversation going beyond a sentence or two to each other. Email has that same feel, no need to reply if you don’t have more to say. No need to say goodbye when you’re leaving your computer. I think Wave captures that. It’s fast when you’re both present, but it’s saved for you to get later if you’re away.

Anyway. I’m all for a unified text-based collaboration platform, so if Google Wave ends up being that, that will be excellent. If it becomes mostly video then hopefully it’s easy to write along with the video to supplement those of us who can’t hear video perfectly.

It’s in an invite-only “Preview” right now. I may have a few invites, so let me know if you are interested. I expect it to spread to more people pretty fast in the next few weeks and months.

If you’re already on wave, you can use the box below to say hi 🙂 If you aren’t, then you’ll probably see part of Google’s page about it.
[wave id=”googlewave.com!w+BUIF1_uEA” color=”#0a0a0a” bgcolor=”#ffffff” font=”Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif” font_size=”10″ width=”400″ height=”700″]