Well, it is about time for me to write a review of Google Wave. Or at least, to express what I feel about Wave as of now. I got my invite quite recently, but I got the chance to try some of the most interesting features of it.

How I see Wave? Basically, it is a massive forum with global audience. You can create threads, that are called waves and invite people to join them. You can see in real time how a person is typing a message and editing it. You can embed various content in posts (like videos and various widgets). Although this might seem a pretty simple concept, it works and once you get the grasp of it, you feel the difference compared to a regular message board. For example, if you missed the moment when the users replied to that wave, you can start the playback and see how everyone was typing and posting their messages. I am not really sure how this could be of some real help in a collaborative process, but the feature is there and it obviously has a use. The waves are tagged, so when you want to look for a wave, you can search for it by using tags. There are still some "interesting" things that come out when you want to make a wave public (so that everyone can access it, not only the people you invite), but I guess this will be worked out in the beta (at least I hope so).

Probably right now Wave is not at that level, as it is usually reviewed, and I really can't call it something extremely innovational. It still has a lot of bugs and the work is in progress. For example, after there are more than 100 replies in a wave, it is getting really buggy and there will be problems with scrolling and overall speed. I experienced this in a wave, and after having to deal with this for a few days, I just consider that it is better to either just use a regular forum or just send an email or (if you really want to and have the possiblity) start an IM conversation. The navigation also can be confusing at first, as the user is working with special commands (those aren't really that complicated, just unusual). Google Wave tries to embed everything in waves. Even when I clicked on Settings, I was quite surprised. I expected a new dialog (or page) to appear where I could customize my options. But no, it will all be in a wave. It is not ready yet so I got this message:



But, the Extensions Settings wave is working (well, it is obviously a priority to give people the chance to see how they can extend waves, rather than just play with general options). Extensions are those plug-ins that can be embedded in a wave to provide some extra features for collaboration (like maps, for example).

Do I like it? I can say that I am somewhere in between right now. There are still too many things that make the work with Wave less productive and reliable, in my opinion. Also, some of the features are still in development and are not accessible (at least I can't access the file actions, like uploading files to a wave).