Khal Weir

I managed to snag an invite from a friend who was lucky enough to be invited to a Google Developers event. Just in case you don’t know Google Wave is the new web app from Google which they believe will replace traditional email and more. The project’s strapline is ‘what if email was invented now?’ and aims to solve some of the problems with they way we communicate online. Wave has the potential to merge and replace IM, Social Networking, Wikis, Email, will be open sourced and has an API allowing developers to write extensions or incorporate Wave in external sites. Here are a couple of videos that explain Wave in more detail

Google Wave in 2 minutes

Google Wave revealed at Google I/O 2009

So far, my impressions are it’s fairly quick and clean… but until more people I know are using it, its only really useable as a kind of twitter/ forum hybrid by browsing the with:public waves. As far as I can tell, theres no way of knowing if a person is currently online, which seems odd to me and every now and again you are reminded that this is a product still in development as it hangs and gives you a quote from Firefly (incidentally, Wave gets its name from the show too).

I’m looking forward to Wave being released publicly and using it at work, as I think it will be an excellent project management tool. We have two offices, in different timezones and communication can be difficult. We currently use an inconsistent combination of Basecamp, Google Docs, Skype, phone calls, email and, within the main Edinburgh office, face to face conversations to communicate; I see Google Wave replacing and centralising a great deal of our communication in a clean, searchable organised tool. If you got here via a Google search for free invites, sorry I don’t have invites to give yet!