So, I got my Google Wave invitation + invites on Saturday. Although it is only a beta, and there aren't vast amounts of people connected to Google Wave yet, the potential of it can be seen clearly.
Firstly, as a combination of email and instant messaging, it seems pretty impressive, however, it is not the easiest of systems to use. Me and two other contacts shared a wave, and used it for real time updates as a substitute from MSN Messenger or Facebook Chat etc. Though we did enjoy being able to see each other type in real time, we did find it difficult to keep any consistency. Instead of a new blip each time we typed, we found that we were accidentally commenting inside each others blips or typing further up the message.
A tool I think that will be extremely useful when the rest of the world is able to sign up to Google Wave is the array of applications one can intergrate into a wave. For example if I was arranging a party, I could use the Poll application as a guest list, post the location using the Google Maps app and after the party I could add all the pictures of the party just by dragging and dropping into the wave from my desktop.
Finally,another impressive addition are the robots. 'Tweety the Twitbot' and 'Bloggy' are just two of the many robots available to into waves. The ease of using a robot on GW is incredible and there is no end to the potential of this addition with it being open to developers.
It is very early days for GW (not even released yet!) and though it is not completely sleek enough for everyone to understand it or get to grips with it, it shows true potential and could live up to the hype that is surrounding it.
