Impressions after more partipants have gotten their invites. Wave is a huge mess once everyone tries to talk (not unlike a real life meeting). You can also hijack a person’s message if you want to so that can be rather distracting. Still not sure how it’s going to work unless we work on a project using only Wave (I wonder if Sales could be convinced to use this though).

Performance-wise, its rather bad once a huge wave or even an ongoing one with 2 people starts to load, cpu utilization goes up and it definitely feels laggy. KC mentioned that he had shown me a similar XMPP style code collaboration tool in Eclipse so real-time messaging isn’t something new.

On the plus side, I really liked SAP and Salesforce demos especially the customer support bot.  Check it out here.  Can’t wait to see what gadgets are being developed!

Some things I’ve found out to make it a better experience if you’re starting out the first time

To add a wave to the public timeline, do this

• Add contact “public@a.gwave.com” , force add it even if the submit button remains disabled.
• Add “public@a.gwave.com” as a participant in the Wave.

More waves are appearing locally and here’s an effort to organize them
Making a Singapore Google Wave List

Actual Waves (about Singapore) , you can search by doing this “with:public singapore” or whichever keyword you want to look up. You’ll need wave access for following links.

• Singapore Wave
• Singapore Wavers

Tweety, add tweety-wave@appspot.com to your wave and once you authorize in the pop-up (lower right bottom corner of Chrome), you’ll be able to post to Twitter and read status updates within Wave itself.

Most importanly, treat this as a new experience and forget about Outlook and Notes (I try everyday to forget I’m using it). Wave is messy, its gory but what’s not to like about a mash of IRC, ICQ, Forums, Search, Widgets(or Gadgets) and Google way!

Managed to get Google Wave access yesterday and have been testing out the various features. An area of interest to me is how to best reduce the UI clutter of various windows and incoming streams as I keep up to date with news and try to work at the same time.

The concept of waves to mash up all the various streams into conversation threads seems like a great idea but definitely requires more polish to succeed.  I can see myself using it if gmail was tied directly in today. The idea of “wiki” style collaboration on documents in real time could really improve how things work in most places. However the barrier would be resistance to change (happens in any product that dramatically changes how people work). Google’s idea of pushing their brand and products to schools (great work on signing up MOE) is definitely the right step to get young minds hooked and warm up to the idea of new ways to work and collaborate.

Some gadgets I’ve tried

• Wavr which allows embedded waves in self-hosted wordpress
  • http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wavr/
• Tweety that provides Twitter conversation in Wave. This could potentially remove the need for Tweetdeck, Yammer clients running right now!
  • http://wave-samples-gallery.appspot.com/about_app?app_id=5002
  • Great guide with screens on how to add Tweety access http://daggle.com/add-twitter-google-wave-1424
• Map and Yes/No/Maybe Gadgets are pretty cool on what’s possible to built as extensions

While waiting for the invite (took 2 weeks!) I  came across some good reads and discussion on this very early dev release (thanks Google for the invite, hopefully more will be able to experience a more polished product soon).

• How Google Wave could transform journalism
• Turning the tide: a hands-on look at Google’s Wave
• Google Wave’s Best Use Cases

Lastly, here’s an embedded wave just to test out the interaction

[wave id=”googlewave.com!w+3ZQOxMf0E”]