My initial review of Google Wave

I have been using Wave for the last couple days, mainly for doing project and task planning with our offshore developers. I have also used it just to goof around and generally insult others that are on Wave as well, all in good fun. Here are my thoughts so far:

Good:

• The real time editing paradigm that Wave uses is really powerful for doing things like discussing screen mocks, editing content pieces on the fly, and recording everyone’s thoughts about a particular item in one spot. We were discussing mods to a particular piece of code today with our team in Mumbai, and we were able to paste in a proposed TODO list, and rip thru each item on the list and make decisions right away. The great thing about it is that you can insert your comments in the exact spot in the thread where they apply. Unlike IM, where the conversation is in date time order ( you see the posts chronologically if you are in a group chat, even if you are responding to something from five minutes ago), you can edit and branch anywhere in the Wave. Very nice.
• The ability to quickly embed content such as videos, pictures, and other gadgets on the fly is great. We dumped in four or five pictures, and there is a slideshow feature that allows you to view them all in a really nice viewer. I also embedded a sudoku gadget and played Sudoku with a couple other folks on the thread, just to see how that would work.
• There are numerous keyboard shortcuts ( some of which worked, some of which I had “issues” with ) that made editing and responding on the wave very fast. No mouse required.
• The ‘Replay’ button is quite nice. It essentially plays back the wave in order, so you can see exactly where and when all changes to the wave took place.
• As with most Google apps, it already has an API. I downloaded Waveboard and immediately started seeing Growl and desktop notifications as waves were changing. This made it so much easier to track when things were happening if I did not have my browser open at that time.

Bad:

• I found it really frustrating that you had to click on every new post in the wave to mark it as ‘Read.’ I understand why it is the way it is ( sort of ), as if you had a really long wave, you might miss something. I might be missing a way to mark the entire wave as read, but when you have 20 messages that are a sentence a piece, you don’t need to physically click on them in order to have seen them. I would have liked a way to just say ‘I am caught up on this wave, please mark it read.’
• There is very little configuration of options and settings. If you click on it, it is obviously on the way, but its not there yet.
• There are no notifications if waves change. So, if you are not logged into the site, and don’t have a program like Waveboard, you have no idea that things are changing.

Ugly:

• I found it very disturbing that I could both edit anyone’s post, as well as anyone could edit mine. This needs to be under permission control, and probably will be in future versions. But, it bothered me.
• I love the live preview of what others are editing as they are editing, but at times I was wishing that I could turn off that feature for me. I pictured myself typing something I perhaps did not want others to see, but it being too late even if I backspaced. If I want to insult someone on the wave, I at least want the chance to rethink it before they see it! 🙂

Other:

• It would be really nice if you could email reply into a Wave ala Posterous. Send an email with a certain set of the right data on it, and it shows up in the wave you designate. ( Thanks, Heath. This was a good one )
• Thinking about how you could integrate SMS within the wave in similar fashion. Not sure on that, but seems like it could / should be possible.

Overall, I am really impressed. Google is again changing the way we think about communicating, just like they did with Gmail. Its a sea change, and I think it’s in the right direction. Can’t wait for the follow-on releases and new features.