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 is ready to release to the world.

But, despite its current rough edges, 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, fast, and universally available.