Wave Rider

Hey folks,

Anyone who’s been following my Social Media traces should know pretty well that I was craving (like mad) for a Google Wave invite. After nearly 2 weeks of craving and nearly losing hope, Raja got a direct Google invite. I still haven’t asked him how he got a direct Google invite. Maybe I should, when I meet him tomorrow.

He announced the news on Twitter and I was the first fellow to ask him for a secondary invite. Srinath soon followed suite. Raja promptly invited us both. Nice guy. Very nice guy, I should say!

About two days later, I got an email from Google saying my account was approved for use with Wave. Yes, I was totally wow-ed! I scrambled for the link on the email and promptly signed up.

I’ve been using it for 2 days now and I think it’s a great collaboration tool. Probably, even better than a Wiki in several aspects. A wiki can serve as a web-site or a blog. But, a wave cannot. Atleast, that’s what I’ve understood of it in these 2 days.

The most amazing thing I have noticed in these 2 days is the fact that everything on Wave is a wave. Your settings page is a wave. Your extensions page is a wave. Your Help page is a wave. I guess that should make it easy for those that use the wave API/Protocol to build apps/extensions over it.

Trust me. A wave is a bad idea to be used for personal communication like a group chat. It might seem to serve that purpose amazingly well initially. But, later on, you’ll realise it’s a pain to communicate like that. Thankfully, you can switch off the real-time content updation. Otherwise, you’d have to waste more than 80% of your time in concentrating on who’s typing what.

For collaboration, it is an amazing tool. I realised that from the videos and from my personal use. I created a wave for my startup idea to collaborate with LVS and Vinay. One for TEDxChennai to collaborate with Raja, Jo et al. A wave for ‘Sit‘ to collaborate with LVS (alone, for the moment). A wave for all my (external) blog posts and a To-Do wave.

For all the above uses, I find Google Wave perfect. I still haven’t tried tweeting from Wave et al. I don’t think I really need to do that. I use Firefox extensions for all my social media profiles. Somehow, they seem more convenient.

More in the days to come.

Yours Skeptically,

P.S. I can’t send invites. So please don’t spam this blog.