So, I’ve had the opportunity to use Google Wave for several weeks now. Here are my first impressions.

1. It’s a wicked cool way to collaborate - more fun than email, IM, or chat. I’m even more convinced than ever that this will be the way we communicate 5 or 10 years down the road.

2. It does have some performance and stability issues however. This is to be expected since Wave is definitely in a pre-alpha, developer preview state. Even a friend of mine at Google is still on the waiting list to get access.

3. If you don’t know other users to start conversations with and you aren’t a participant in any existing conversations then you are left talking to yourself which is boring no matter what tool you use.

   At the start, attendees of Google I/O were BCCed on several announcement waves so we could read, but not write and could not see the other attendees. We could, however, see the wave IDs of the Google Wave team members who wrote these waves. So I quickly added them to my contact list and started a new wave to point out that just having an account on Wave isn’t enough. A few days later, someone started a new wave with an “invite-bot” as one of the participants. This wave we could edit, adding our wave IDs to an opt-in or opt-out list. I’m not sure how this works on the back-end, but soon my inbox started filling with waves that I could fully participate in. That’s the good news.

4. The bad news is that a number of waves started showing up in foreign languages that I can’t read - mostly ideographic, east Asian languages like Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. I’m happy to see people from other parts of the world interacting on wave. I believe that down the road, with good translation-bots in the mix, Wave has the potential to bring the whole world closer together and bridge cultural gaps. But for now, I don’t want to see “Michael Jackson <unreadable> king of pop <unreadable> bless <unreadable>” Unfortunately, I haven’t found a good way to eliminate these waves so that they stay eliminated. I’ve tried muting them, I’ve tried moving them to an “Ignore These” folder, but they keep coming back. It’s like playing “Whack-a-Mole.” So, I’m glad that invite-bot exists, but “be careful what you ask for” definitely applies.

5. Even worse, too many in the developer community are posting their lame-ass, first-draft widgets and robots in public for the world to see. We each got two wave accounts - our ID and our ID-test - which should be enough to allow people get their stuff debugged BEFORE inflicting it on everybody else but I suppose that good development discipline is too much to ask for in such a diverse community.

6. I suspect that waves in fonts that are not universally deployed and badly behaving robotic participants may be behind much of the slow speed and frequent crashes that I am seeing.

7. Google Wave needs a much better way of finding, entering, and leaving conversations before it release to the world.

But, despite my complaints, Google Wave is a wicked cool way to collaborate - more fun than the law allows. I can hardly wait for it to be complete, stable, and fast.

Just back from Google I/O and soon off to bed to take a nap. Up at 5 AM two days in a row is tough on a guy who’s natural sleep cycle is down at 2 AM.

But, I must comment on Google Wave.

I have felt the ground shift under my feet this much only three times in my life.

The first was October 17, 1989 during the Loma Prieta earthquake - 7.1 on the Richter scale.

The second was November 9, 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. Never expected to see that in my life.

And the third was sometime in the spring of 1993 when I walked into a conference room at HP to look at something they were calling a “web browser.” After clicking on a couple of links, I knew that this would change everything.

I felt that again this morning.

Imagine an application that combines all of the best features of email* (* meaning all programs that serve this function) with IM* with Evite* with Wikies* with Microsoft Word* with Wordpress* with Google Groups* with polling and serveys* with form based data entry* with Flikr* with Facebook* with Twitter* with bug reporting* with tagging* with …

Now imagine that rather than competing with each of these apps for your mind-share and precious attention span, it embraced these applications and interacted with them seamlessly through “robots” on the server. This means that you can create and share a conversation across a broad community of people using Facebook and MySpace and Twitter and email and any other application for which a proxy robot has been developed and they can all participate fully even though the characteristics of their application’s interactivity model as well as the speed and reliability of their network connections differ wildly. Google Wave is agnostic about these things and everything gets synched up as needed when participants enter or exit the conversation.

Now, imagine that it combined all of these things into a real-time collaborative conversation down to the level of multiple people making simultaneous character-by-character edits to the same line at the same time. Not only that, but you can embed this conversation in your own web-site or blog.

Now, imagine that it did all of these things within a single user interface using drag-and-drop of rich-text and media content rather than wiki-codes, _TML markup, insert hyperlink, or other application/domain specific tricks.

If you’re still standing, imagine that it also used a spell checker not based on dictionaries, but on language knowledge derived from the analysis of the entire indexable web - oh, and not just English but any of 40 languages with on-the-fly translations between any two languages. We are talking, for example, about people from the United States, Great Britain, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, etc., none of whom speak each other’s language or dialect, all collaborating on a “conversation” available in each of their languages - or any one of dozens more.

Now, imagine that you can join this conversation in the middle but see it from the start and use video playback like controls to rewind, play back, and watch it evolve over time.

Now, imagine that all of this runs in-the-cloud (or some federated version thereof for security and/or competitive reasons) as most of Google Wave will be open source and the protocols will be open.

Finally, imagine that this app runs in any “modern” (AKA HTML 5) web browser with the same level of responsiveness that you might expect from a native app. This means not only Google Chrome but Firefox, IE8, Safari, Opera, and others. Oh, and by the way, the user interface runs in the browser but all the heavy lifting is done on servers in the cloud so it’s light-weight enough to run on your cell phone.

Oh - My - God!

This really changes everything.