Yes, I was one of the lucky few who happened to know someone who was willing to send me an invite to preview Google Wave last week. You can read more about my experience and thoughts in my first guest post ever written. It’s over on Thoughtpick.com and you can read it HERE. Once I added a few contacts I decided it would be a cool way to test out the collaborative functionality of Wave by conducting a small interview asking my contacts about their first impressions of the new technology. More about the process and experience is in the Thoughtpick article, but I wanted to share the interview transcripts here with you. Each of the users had some similar and some unique contributions, so I think you will find it beneficial as we all voyeuristically anticipate the widespread release of this phenomenal new tool, platform or whatever you want to call it.

So here is how I started the Wave out:

Hello friends! I am actually calling it a night but I wanted to ask each of you – those few who I have in my new Google Wave contacts – to share your first impressions of Wave for a blog post I will be writing on Friday. Anything at all that you can share about the following:

»   What was your first impression?

»   What are ways that you think Wave is or will be useful?

»   What are things about Wave that you don’t like?

»   Any other thoughts you have?

I am going to be putting this together for a guest post on another blog to talk about my – and your – first couple days with Wave and our thoughts, as opposed to the “experts” who have already been either raving about it or tearing it apart. I would greatly appreciate anything you can share. If you would like me to reference your blog or website or Twitter account just leave that info too.

THANKS!

And here are the answers my contacts gave, in the order they responded:

Dana Coffey (@crazeegeekchick)

My first impression was “okay this is neat but what in the heck do I do with it?” I think it would be very useful collaborating on a project or even for some remote presentations at code camps and conferences. I don’t like the fact that for now live wave accounts can’t wave with dev sandbox accounts. I have some things in the sandbox I’d like to test. All in all I think Wave has potential, but I’d like to actually see a few different use cases in action before I decide if I will use it the way I use other online environments/services such as twitter. Thanks for including me!

Matt Brox (@MattBrox)

What was your first impression?

Stylish! Very fitting with the Google chrome look, it was a bit hard to figure out but the help section was extremely…..helpful

What are ways that you think Wave is or will be useful?

Feeling more in touch with friends, when we go on instant messengers we only receive people messages, with wave the live typing fea- wave just crashed…
That’s one problem, I said I needed to refresh, other than that it’s all worked fine
The fact that Wave has video chat, games, voting, and even twitter is not only awesome, but more and more extensions will be released when wave is fully released.

What are things about Wave that you don’t like?

The fact that it doesn’t show if people are offline / away / busy etc
That’s pretty much all I see wrong with this since it has so much right!

Any other thoughts you have?

hmmm not really…I’m quite fond of the spelling corrector, even though people can see you suck at spelling with the live typing feature

Ticci (@storiesofmac)

My first impression was bad. I mean, I’m testing Wave since the developer preview, so things at the time were buggy, slow and I had only one contact. I couldn’t understand why I should move from Skype and emails to Wave.

Now, I have more than 20 contacts and I’m beginning to understand the real power of Wave: interactivity. Users can talk, share stuff, video chat, everything within the same application. With future updates, I believe it’s gonna be the perfect tool for bloggers, designers and people who need to co-operate for their works.

But anyway, there are many things that I don’t like by now. Who designed the UI of Wave? Why is it so slow sometimes? Google Wave is still in beta, I believe Google will fix/change many things very, very soon.

April Nanney (@OneLuvGurl) dorkmuffin.com

What was your first impression?

My first impression was that it reminded me a lot of the Gmail web-interface with the layout looking very much like your inbox. Once you get over the basic look, you realize that this is no email! While it’s pretty easy to figure out how to create a wave or add people to one, it takes a bit to get your bearings and figure out how to actually use one. While having your first conversation in a wave, it takes a bit to get used to using the features that are offered so far.

What are ways that you think Wave is or will be useful?

I think Google Wave will be useful in having conversations like you would normally have in an Instant Messaging client. It’s easier to share files, you can play games in real-time, and while normally you have to start a new conversation, here the wave is constantly flowing. If IM is a normal communication program, Google Wave would be it’s superhero equivalent.

Another great feature that I think will be great is seeing Google Wave take over comments on websites and forums. Since it’s in real-time, it’s like having a chatroom of ongoing conversations about an topic rather than not being able to read comments that haven’t been approved by a moderator yet. While I do think this is cool, I can see a downside to this as well, such as spammers taking advantage of an open wave and posting something that would normally be moderated, If the spammer deletes the “reply” that they themselves posted, the damage is already done if people have read it while it was publicly viewable. I think this will require more moderation within the community of the website. Using Twitter as an example, if spammers can aquire an account easily, then Google will have to start policing wave accounts and I hope that they have a plan in place for this.

Another upside to Google Wave is that anyone can have a social community that they start, just by creating a wave. You don’t need a website to do it and the wave address can be public so rather than going through a process to sign up for a site, all you need is to be added to the wave. But again, this would require a lot of moderation. I expect to see a lot more anti-spam bots or bots that regulate profane language, etc.

What are things about Wave that you don’t like?

While I like to see people type as they are typing because it is funny to watch them correct their own typos (including myself!), at the same time I would like to be able to turn this feature off if I choose to. I would also like the option to just be able to hit “Enter” to send a reply, rather than use a shortcut or having to click several times to send a message that people can already see anyways. If people want to use this only as a messaging client, this would be a great option.

Another thing is the fact that I cannot delete waves right now, which is a little annoying because I believe if you start a wave, you should have the option to delete it. Right now I can only put it in the trash, but it is still active. With everyone learning how to use this, I can just imagine how many waves are sitting in trash bins waiting to be deleted.

With the integration of services updating to social sites, I think that people should be aware of the dangers of adding people to waves that they think may be harmless. While I set up my Twitter wave with Tweety, I added Brian to it to see if he could tweet from my wave. Not only could he tweet to my profile, I couldn’t remove him once he was added. Now, I trust Brian so I wasn’t worried about him, but I did accidentally add someone who I didn’t know which made me worry about the security of my Twitter account and I almost changed my password. After a few minutes, I realized that I could at least click on the Tweety bot and remove it, which cut off access to my Twitter account and saved me a lot of headache. It was cool that someone could see my timeline and tweet from my account without knowing my password, it also opened up the chance that someone can use your Tweety wave and use your legitimate account to send out their spam. I would really like to see people being warned about this.

Lastly, I’ve had some glitches that occurred, such as not letting me reply and telling me to refresh, and it’s not as fluid as it should be, but I believe that these things will be fixed once Google knows all the bugs. I realize that this is a “preview”, so that was expected.

Any other thoughts you have?

I don’t think that Google Wave will take over email, but I do think that it has the potential to cut down on the amount of email we currently have. I also think that the average internet user will not be able to “wave” simply because right now it is not very user-friendly to non-tech minded people or because they are not willing to change to Google Wave to communicate when they have other options and are quite happy with them. If this was the only way to communicate, sure, but until then people will still use email, text, and IM, and still use file sharing services instead of just, well, “Waving”.

Emily Gonsalves (@emilygonsalves)

website: http://emilygonsalves.com/
art blog: http://artblog.emilygonsalves.com/
comic series: http://greencorner.emilygonsalves.com/ (I have a couple of Google groups for this, but I tend to be the only sending messages to the group)

First impression: The interface is very clean, and clearly Google branded. I think it will take a little time to understand some of the features, but that’s to be expected with a new service.

How it will be useful: I haven’t really gotten to explore Wave a lot just yet; but like others have said I do see it being useful for collaboration as well as for discussions with clients (I’m a freelance graphic designer, for those who don’t know me). Also, there are people like my brother that I will chat with, and we’re constantly sharing links or files via e-mail when we talk online or even on the phone. Waving instead would be a lot more convenient.

I could also see this being really useful if planning an event or party. Especially if there are multiple people involved in the planning. And discussing gifts for family members around the holidays! My brother, sister, and I always end up with disconnected conversations about what we’re getting for our parents and extended family. It would be a lot easier if we could keep most of it in one place and just hide what we’re getting each other

Things I dislike (which I’m probably going to pass on to Google in some way): The scroll bar is really annoying. I don’t like having to grab it to scroll. The wheel on my mouse works to some extent, but I can’t click at the top of the scroll area to get to the top of the conversation.

Also, shortcuts for formatting that work in Gmail and Docs don’t seem to be enabled yet. Oh wait, yes they are… they just didn’t add the mac shortcuts in. I’m sure they will get to that though.

Another thing, what is the mute feature actually useful for?

I’m going to have to look around a little more, I keep seeing buttons that make no sense just yet.

Yikes, sometimes when shortcuts don’t respond, it does weird things Pressing home and end a few times took me to another wave.

CONCLUSION

I hope you have found this useful. To me it’s very helpful to hear others thoughts and questions and impressions. Plus we were able to help each other discover different features and functionality as we were using Google Wave.

If you have been previewing Wave and would like to share your thoughts, please do so in the comments below. If you haven’t had the chance or an invitation yet, let us know your thoughts as well so we can all hear the different viewpoints regarding this exciting new technology.

And no, I’m sorry but I don’t have any invitations, so please don’t ask for one. Be patient. Soon enough everyone will have a chance to use Google Wave. Who knows what will happen then?

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