Google Wave has been the biggest news in the tech world the last two months, and everyone has been talking about and it's way to change the email, IM, filesharing and a lot of other concepets on the web.
Finally I have an active account on Google Wave, I've got it 3 days before, I was really excited to try it out, but... things are really serious inside!
It looks like an email client, because you can find inbox, spam, trash ... but it's not. It looks like a chat client too, but it's far better, it has a lot that I still didn't discover yet.
Trying to change my profile picture, it took me to a Gmail settings page where you can find almost everything an ordinary Gmail account has! In fact the same Google Wave Id can be used to sign into Gmail and doing this will show you just the mail part of Google Wave services, as you can see, there is the Google Wave logo and not the Gmail one.
If you watched the IO 2009 keynote already then you saw almost everything about the current Google Wave, you can edit waves; reply to a wave or partially to a specific content and lot of more stuff. As shown in this screenshot you can send private replies as long as drafts and even copy them to a new wave to share it between other contacts!
What I still don't get its idea yet is the concept of private and public, I seriously need more time on that to see things clearly.
What is also very useful in Google Wave is that it give you the ability to have a non sequential conversations, you can say like in real life talking and not like IM now, let’s see those 2 persons having an IM conversation:
A : Hi how are you!
A : I heard you got a new job.
A : Is your cousin's computer dead?
B : Hi, fine what about you.
B : Yes yes, it was fun.
Here obviously A won't understand clearly what fun is! Getting a new job or the cousin's computer being dead!!!!
But in Google Wave things work different, you can edit in place replies, so each one can see which reply is for which answer like in the following picture:
A problem might rise in that case! How do I know which reply was first? Since I can reply in the bottom of the massage then embed an inline reply at the beginning, and how will I follow messages when I am offline then comeback online?
The answer is the wave playback feature, it shows you the time sequence of the replies and when they accrued, in fact it's like a recorder, it give you what happened in a specific point of the wave lifetime, for example, what changed in the text, who edited this, who joined he wave, who left...
Beyond that, we find a very handful tools for debugging that developers and testers need to dig deep into things. (Also you have the availability to add gadgets like playing chess, there are even funny bots which you can play dice and other games with.) This screenshot shows how it looks like, it's really a very advanced debugging tool, and I didn't yet tried it out, maybe once I get my hands dirty with Google Wave's technical stuff I'll post some of my "discoveries" :)
After this very brief first look at Google Wave, I noticed that it runs very slow on Google Chrome and a little better on Firefox, I don't think it work on internet explorer 7 or below since it's built on HTML5, also it has a lot of bugs, which is normally because it still in a developer preview. Also there are a lot of bugs that makes it a little harder to handle.
It also uses a lot of traffic, means users with a low network speed will (maybe) not be able to benefit from the Google Wave's functionalities at all, and I wonder if there will be a lightweight version like in the Gmail HTML mode?
More information here : http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/
