Google Wave invitations and usability

About a month or month-and-a-half ago Google released their latest communication platform called Google Wave. When I say released I mean that it was opened in an invite-only mode – yes, you had to be invited to use it. There were a limited number of invitations (100,000 if I’m not mistaken) to be sent out for round 1. On top of that, those 100,000 were eligible to send out to 8 of their friends/contacts. The catch was even if you invited your friends, they were not necessarily going to receive the invitation right away, or even in the next 3 weeks for that matter. In my case, I waited about 2.5 weeks before receiving an invitation…I was a little sad.

It’s now been about 1.5 months since they first let people inside their newest creation. Many of us have recently (for me, November 12th) been given the opportunity to invite 8 of OUR friends too, and to my surprise those friends got their invitations in a matter of hours. This is great news! Are we going to continue to see more and more people allowed to invite their friends, at a speedy rate? I sure hope so – better yet, I’m excited when this gets opened to the public. Right when the first 100,000 invitations went out, people were going crazy to get one, even bidding on ebay!

Now that I’ve been able to connect with several friends, communicating directly over Google Wave, I’d like to briefly talk about the usability. The platform is different, certainly. Like Gmail, it’s not your ordinary email system or chat program. Yes, it has similarities but far more powerful. As you converse, you can have multiple people in a “wave” (or chat) all typing at once without any rules. As someone types a message, you can watch every word they type, even if they erase a little to fix spelling mistakes – it’s mind boggling. On top of that, you can have threaded replies to parts of messages, go back to something said earlier and reply, and far more. In addition to just text, you can add plug-ins or bots which add more functionality such as emoticons, polling, games, maps, and the list goes on.

This may sound really exciting, and it is. Will this really become a popular method of communicating…probably so, but you will not find the majority of people using it because I don’t think it’s user friendly. It’s powerful, maybe too powerful. If you find Gmail confusing…don’t even bother with Google Wave, believe me.

It will be interesting to watch over the next 6 months. Do people adapt it in their activities? Does it replace instant message programs? Keep an eye out.