I received an invite to Google wave a while back. I used it sparingly but always kept a tab open in FireFox to see if anything was going to “happen”. In short, I just didn’t get it. And I probably still don’t.
I think the first problem with Wave is that only a few people have it. Of course that barrier will be removed in time, but until then, what is the point? It seems to be little more than instant messaging, just in a shiny new package. Hey, I like shiny things as much as the next person, but these days my time is limited. If a new social or collaboration tool comes along then there had better be a good reason for me to invest my time.
And I just never saw the potential. Until yesterday. That is when I found this post about riding the wave. Suddenly, it started to make sense to me:
The Wave has the potential to produce a greater impact in a shorter amount of time on my professional career than Twitter has in the past 18 months.
How is that possible? Well, it isn’t, really. See, it is easy to use Twitter. Everyone can do it. And the messages are short, very short, which means you can quickly scan through them as you pan for gold. The Wave is more difficult to work with. Exponentially more difficult to work with, actually. And not everyone has access. Which means it will be a long time before it ever has a chance to become mainstream and popular. But there is potential, trust me.
See, until I read the post above, I thought the Wave was a private thing. I had no idea that public Waves existed. None. Chances are that they have been explained to others at some point, but I was not alone in being in the dark on public Waves. But once I found they existed, I started to do some searching. The first thing I tried was “with:public:sql” which returned only a handful of results, but results nonetheless. After some time I also found this page:
http://www.google.com/support/wave/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=162900
That page was like my Rosetta Stone. Except it was all in English. And in a web browser, not actually etched in stone. But it did help me decipher how to use the Wave. So now I can ride the Wave by searching for “about:sql”, “about:azure”, or “about:twitter”. Try it for yourself. What’s that? You don’t have the Wave yet? Drop me an email an I will send you an invite. Want to make a wave of yours public? Then add public@a.googlewave.com as a participant, and then ignore the errors by pressing ‘Enter”. Trust me.
I think that many more people are using the Wave right now but are not making their waves public. That makes the search results sparse right now, but I am certain we can change that over time. I am starting to see some value in the Wave and would like to have others join me in giving it a chance. Once we get past the difficulty of getting invited, getting used to the browser interface, and getting used to the longer conversations then we will realize how Google Wave is the NNTP for the 21st century.
