Google Wave – what now?

So I’ve been fortunate (?) enough to be part of the Google Wave roll out and I’ve spent some time playing with it. This isn’t going to be a long post there are enough other posts for that on the web – you can find some of them here:

This post however is my quick thoughts:

Google Wave is a well executed, well designed system for communication
It is a mixture of IM (skype, GTalk) and email. It’s almost email in real time in that you can see other members typing things – you can edit these messages as the arrive. These are called Waves
“Waves” are ‘recorded’ in a time line so you can play it back and see the edits in sequence
There are some nice features, include Google Maps in a “Wave”, or a YouTube video, and a Yes No Maybe module
That’s it
Yeap that’s it

So umm sure you can share files (but so can email), you can … umm … well … actually, you can’t do much more than that. At least not yet. As a platform it’s interesting and shows some merit, but as a solution right now it’s …. well … basic to say the least.

I can’t even integrate my Google Docs into Waves, I can’t really do much with it. Yes I have friends in there and yes we are using it in context of discussing things… well discussing Google Wave.

So there is a lot of hoo-har over Google Wave, and I do believe that the technology has merit, however I’d have thought & I was expecting more, much more. I’m not actually all that blown away (yet).