After falling madly head-over-heels for Google Wave, I've discovered that my infatuation was based more on lust than love. Sure, at first sight, it seemed beautiful and wonderful, despite warning me that it was not ready for a long-term relationship. So now, we remain great friends, though don't talk as often as we once did (nor perhaps as much as we should). But I'll stay in touch because I now realize a good tool, like a good friend, is sometimes exactly what you need to make a bad day better, or a good day great.
I've attempted to categorize the types of waves I've seen. There could be others, but these seem to be prevalent in my inbox:
- IM style messages
- Voting systems
- Long term documentation
- Forum style/interest topics
- Running jokes
Of these, the first two are where I think Wave excels. Or maybe, that's just where I've learned to use it best. Both of these share a common trait - they are short lived. These are replacements for IM messages and short lived emails. Waves persist, while IM messages don't. The ability to see messages being typed, and the ability to change them could make IM obsolete, and make email laughable as a collaboration tool. I've seen the real time, multiple user style IM communication wow many new users.
I find waves very helpful for conversations that last only a day or two. Distributed standup meetings, getting concensus on design decisions and helping other developers get up to speed on new technologies are all situtations where Wave has been a tremenous help. These are all conversations that stale quickly.
Some of the limitations of Wave could be improved in future iterations. A better alert system, the ability to hide waves (having them only reappear if content is updated) and the ability to remove users from a wave (or even removing ones self), would go far in making Wave better for longer term communication.
Wave is now one of my main communication tools. Right up there with email, IM and RSS, Google Wave is something I'll continue to use daily.
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