Playgroup | Creativity through play

It's official. I got my invite from Google on Monday. Im a waver ☺. 

I've had a few days to play around with it now, and I have come to the conclusion that it is truly magnificent, and it will take over the world - IF everyone adopts it. But having a preview is really boring, and can't really be testing all that much for Google - because no-one has any contacts. 

I mean, I had invites, (which get sent out quite slowly), but everyone I invited didn't, so we can only talk to each other. Its even got to the stage that one person I spoke to once, about 4 years ago has tweeted me asking me to add them. But I'd never email them, so why would I wave them? 

Anyway. Google Wave. I don't know if you watched the 1hr20min Google Video on it, but I know haven't. I have, however watched a lot of little videos on all the cool stuff it (will) do. You can embed all kinds of nice things into waves, like sudoku puzzles (my personal favourite), maps (bit predictable, it IS google), videos, searches and yes-no-maybe boxes, somewhat reminiscent of Facebook events. You can add "robots" to your conversations, enabling twitter updates through Google Wave, live translating (why don't I have anyone I want to email in another country?!), and blogger updates (this looks pretty cool, but unfortunately I don't have a blogger blog).

But the thing is, I love google docs. I think they're entirely awesome. And to me, Google Wave just seems to be combining HTML emails with google docs - not this hugely amazing innovation it is made out to be, especially considering how long it's been trending on Twitter. And more people seem to know about Google Wave than know about Google Docs. Which is freely available - no long waiting list to get an invite, just go there, and edit things simultaneously. There's also a really cool video about love letters. 

In other words, don't hold your breath about when you are going to get your invite. It will be awesome, but only when anyone you ever want to email has converted to an @googlewave.com account. And I think that's going to be quite a while. After all, my grandparents only got their first email about 4 years ago. And email's been around for 40 years. Google's got a long road ahead. 

p.s. Thanks to RafaGarces for the google wave pic ☺

Posted by Cat on 18 Nov 09, at 10:11 am

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