So I have been using Google Wave for a week or so now and friends keep asking me what it actually is, so I have decided to share my first impressions. If you want a detailed review or guide you might want to look elsewhere. There are loads of extensive reviews out there, that go into far more detail than I can be bothered with. Instead I’m just going to share a normal(ish) users opinion on the pro & cons of wave. Partly to give potential users a basic overview that should help them decide if the tool is suited to them, but also to share views and suggestions with other users and discover more about the potential uses.

Basically Google Wave is an an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. This means you can use it for all sorts of things, real time chat or conversation, group projects or even interactive games. Waves can contain text, photos, videos, maps, and plenty more. This all sounds great on paper, but what does that actually mean for new users? As a long-term user of forums, chat and social networking I have used various online systems from newsgroups and irc through to yuku forums and twitter. I was therefore keen to try out Wave, and have certainly enjoyed using it, but so far I haven’t managed to pin down how or when I will use it.

Working it out

So after a few weeks of wondering what on earth Google Wave is all about you finally get your official invite, yet despite signing in you still don’t really have a clue what it’s for. You are not alone. For me the immediate problem was figuring out what to do next, how to find good waves, how to make waves, and what on earth they should be about.

Luckily for me I have a few friends on there, so I was quickly added to a few active waves and soon figured out how to get involved. I am also know how to search for things on google, so It didn’t take me long to figure out that I needed to use public:wave before my search query to view anything that has been made public, but I have had a lot of queries about this from other users, so can’t help wondering why such basic features aren’t more obvious. I do suspect, that for many users the whole thing might seem a bit too confusing and complicated, and they might be stuck with an almost empty inbox with no idea what to do next. Obviously some confusion is inevitable when a system offers so many options, however I think they may have made some features that need to be obvious tricky to find.

As great as it is that you can install extensions, I can’t help thinking that being able to find waves or insert a picture without having to search for help would be far more valuable for new users. Of course google tries to give you as much help as possible, by sending you a few handy guides, but once again I think all that information is a bit overwhelming for new users. For me the most frustrating things is how heavily the guides rely on instructional videos. As someone who can generally figure out software myself, I tend to scan through help documents to find the particular feature I am having problems with. The last thing I want to do is watch a 5 minute video to figure out basic functions or which button/keyboard shortcut is needed.

So what now?

Once you have got your head round the basics of how it works, contributed to or started waves with your friends or patricipated in public waves, you might find yourself wondering what on earth you are going to use it for.  This is of course very familiar to people who have used sites like twitter, which can seem pointless till you try them and build up a good feed. However, because Wave invites were initially very limited, it was hard to find friends to communicate with at first. Hopefully now that more users are being invited Wave will feel a lot more active, and with luck the system and it’s content will evolve organically into something that immediately grabs our attention.

I do suspect that it might almost be too general, which may make it too easy to miss the point. With twitter you are limited to text, links and a small number of characters, which influences the type of content posted. On forums users are generally there due to shared interests, and over the years etiquette has developed. As all encompassing as Wave is, there is still a lot of confusion over its usage, and as yet it is hard for everyone to put their finger on what they want to use it for, apart from talking about my cat of course.

While I don’t want extra rules or restrictions, I do hope that the service develops it’s own etiquette (much like Retweeting was created by users on twitter) and uses, as some structure will hopefully help people figure out how to get the most out of it. Of course the whole point of the system is that waves can be about anything or everything, but being able to check out popular and succesfull waves would no doubt encourage us all to add good content.

I do think the developers need to make it easier for us to find relevant content. Forums and social networking sites like twitter or facebook work well because it’s easy to see what your friends are posting, and get involved or find new contacts. This visibility seems to be missing on Wave. While you can search for public threads, there is no quick view of popular waves or waves your friends are posting in, so new users have no idea how to find that great content. Unless you are lucky enough to have active friends who add you to waves you have to find them yourself, and might end up missing out on great content you would love to get involved in.
So far I have enjoyed using wave to chat with friends, find and discuss music, discuss specific topics, share links to great websites or games, help myself and other users with the system itself and most importantly bore everyone with pointless waves about my handsome cat. As great as all that is, I don’t think any of us have managed to stretch wave to it’s full potential yet, or figure out what it does best, but I am certainly enjoying trying.

So what’s bugging me?

Despite all my seemingly negative comments above I do like Wave, and I am hopeful that it will take off. Any problems I have mentioned are purely due to the infancy of the system and despite my moaning I personally enjoy figuring out how things work, however one thing I don’t enjoy is dealing with frequent bugs and error messages.  Hopefully a lot of it is down to teething problems, but at the moment I frequently have to reload Wave due to incredible lagging, script errors, Wave error messages or the whole thing (including any other browser windows I have open) freezing.

This doesn’t really surprise me, as it’s a beta version and I have used on on a variety of browsers and machines, but it does put me off, as spending 5 mins writing a brief response is incredibly frustrating. There are a few other little glitches that I find annoying. For some reason whenever I start a new wave the system creates another blank wave which I then have to delete. If you expand the user list within a wave and scroll right to the bottom the list automatically closes before you are able to add anyone, which is deeply annoying if you are trying to add someone near the bottom of your list. The scrollbar works very differently to the standard to save space, which is fine, but personally I find it almost impossible to get it to scroll to the bit of the wave I am trying to see, as it either whizzes by or I get lagged/stuck above it.

I think they could make simple improvements to the waves themselves, which would make them a lot easier to use. Much like traditional newsgroups users can reply under certain messages, creating sub-threads, which is great but can make the thread confusing at a glance. This could be a lot simpler if these sub-threads/replies were minimised as default, with an option to expand or collapse. Not having to read every tangent would make scrolling through the thread a lot easier, and highlighting the messages with unread replies would make it impossible to miss new messages, even if they are minimised.

Hopefully as people share suggestions or frustrations google will fix and improve the service. As I have worked in development I am the last person to be unsympathetic to bugs and teething problems, and am happy to work around them for now, but if the lagging/freezing issue isn’t resolved or gets worse I will be simply unable to try… well not without bashing either my laptop or the front of my head to pieces by repeatedly banging it into the desk. From discussion with my Wave buddies I know that these problems are fairly common, although oddly everyone seems to report slightly different errors, depending perhaps on their browser, OS or system.

Finally

This post may seem negative, as I have shared a lot of things I don’t like about wave, however I have no doubt that it will continue to improve and reach it’s full potential. My main concern is that some users will be put off in these early stages, despite it’s beta status. However, as Google have such a good track record, I am hopeful that most enthusiastic users will persevere and help build wave into something great. The way they have staggered the invites has also helped build up the hype, and makes it seem far more desirable, so hopefully when they finally get an invite most users will invest enough time to get into it.

Of course these are just my first impressions. We will all have different opinions, skills and interests, so if you have tried Wave please share your thoughts below, as it might help enlighten other users, and me of course. I hope that discussing the pro’s and cons of wave, or simply sharing simple tips, will help us all figure out how to get the most out of this brand new tool. I have also started a Wave to ask users what they think, so I may be adding updates based on their comments.

If you are new to wave, or want to know more about it’s uses, have a look at the Google Wave help files.