My Experience with Google Wave – A Review

Several weeks ago I wrote an article called, “Will Google Wave Replace Twitter?”. Today, I am writing a follow up article now that I have had firsthand experience with the wave.

Yesterday, @cyberdad began a wave and included Misty and me. If getting on twitter is called tweeting, does that mean in the wave you are waving? I’ll assume so. We waved for about thirty minutes, and I included a screenshot below of our wave.

I realized more than ever that we are all three super geeks because we were acting as if it was more exciting than Christmas morning. I sort of knew what to expect since I had read all the information about the wave prior to getting on, but there were several things I was not expecting.

First of all, the wave moves very fast. We only had three people in our wave, and it was moving so fast on the screen you could easily get dizzy or left out if you aren’t as sharp as a tack that day. The reason for this is because even with only three people, the natural progression is for small separate conversations to begin within the wave itself.

For example, @cyberdad was typing a message to teach Misty and me about the video feature and at the same time Misty and I were typing about how cool the whole thing was. You see all of this on the screen which is constantly moving.

Since it all moves much faster than I was expecting, it brings me to my next point – you must be a fast typist or you will get left in the dust. Seriously. Think about a real life conversation – three people standing there talking – someone asks a question – before they are even finished asking, someone has answered it and brought up another related thought.

It’s the same thing in the wave – it is real time – someone will answer your question before you are even finished typing it, then someone else types a thought and if you are still typing behind a few messages, that relevance of that thought is now gone. You have to type fast.

Oh – and about those pesky spelling errors that everyone sees as you are typing them, I noticed that with the wave, very similarly to tweets and other social media, nobody cares. People know what you are trying to say and move on. I used to be embarrassed about those spelling errors because I am a perfectionist, but now my attitude is – to borrow @Alyssa_Milano’s Twitter hashtag – #dontjudgeme.

Another thing I noticed is that the wave is very similar to Twitter, but not in the way you may think. I often will have complete conversations with a Twitter friend on direct message. You know, it’s a conversation that you want to have with a friend that you don’t want out there for everyone to see.

With those kinds of conversations, there is a minute or so of lag time while you wait for the DM to appear on the screen. I’ve never thought that was a problem before since I’m usually doing other things at the same time; however, with the wave, you could have those same conversations with no lag time. It is instant, right there; you watch the other person type. You cannot get any more instant-gratification than that.

When it’s all said and done, I give the wave a huge thumbs up. It is much cooler than I was expecting. Suddenly standard email seems so web 1.0 to me. The wave seems like and progresses just like a real life conversation. Although I know some people will resist this comment, I can very easily see how this is the future of relationship building.

The wave is also very tied into gmail, which seems obvious but I didn’t get that at first. If you want to add a photo (avatar) to your wave account, you add it at gmail first and it automatically transfers over.

You can easily save your waves my clicking “archive.” When you want to view them again, just click “all.” I saved the wave we had yesterday; after all, you always want to remember your first time, right? Thank you to my friends @cyberdad and Misty for sharing the experience with me.

For more information on Google Wave, read Mashable’s Google Wave: A Complete Guide by clicking here: http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/