Trying to get my head around waving.

Well some first impressions on waving.

First take is that waves are a kind of mix between IM and email, merging the real time and delayed time features of email, IM, and chat in to a personal collaboration suite.

Google has introduced a number of terms to indicate threads (waves) and parts of waves. You can start a wave, add contacts to a wave including bots which can be tasked to add to the wave. For example I have been using a Wikipedia bot which defines terms and provides links to data in Wikipedia.

Honest opinion, I have been playing with it for 3 days and all I have is a disorganised mess. It is my experience that chats forums are perhaps one the worst collaboration tools, and I have a hard time seeing how these are any different. I have completely lost track of two waves I have been working on, I have no idea where to write and I can't tell when people are writing to me.

I don't want to say it is a dog like Google Docs just yet, but I am finding it hard to learn whereas I was able to use SharePoint, Blogger, Twitter and Second Life on the first try. My first Waves are fiascoes.

Google is clearly thinking about adding Wave as a verb like Google, Bing and Tweet. But Google was obvious from the UI, you typed and relieved. Tweet made sense when you looked at the bird, just a quick message chanted out in to the ear seeking a listener. We all know how birds communicate and how we do the same kind of communication in certain social events, Twitter just linked in to a hard wired behaviour.

But waving? If they plan to go up against SharePoint they already had the hurdle of getting people to think in terms of waving and use it in a way that makes sense.