As with any so called revolutionary technology, initially, there is always a great divide between those who become early adopters/proponents and those that remain on the sidelines watching skeptically. Google Wave is currently in that position. Since the time Google sent out its first batch of invites, people have been trying to evaluate whether it’s just a cool gimmick or does it have any value. For those who came in late, Google Wave is a real time collaborative tool that purges the line between instant messaging, email, collaborative tools, wikis and social media.

If you have the patience, you may want to watch Google’s really long video (1hr 20 min) on the official site. In a nutshell, Wave is a power packed set of tools for creation. It allows you to create dynamic ‘waves’ (wiki-like documents) in which you can invite people to have conversations and collaboratively create, brainstorm, share pictures, videos, while even taking polls on topics of debate, among other things. It allows for rich text and the best feature is the ability to annotate any part of the wave with comments.

People on the wave can reply to the comments and participants can view what is being typed ‘in real time’- as its being written. If you were invited to the wave at a later stage of development, you can even rewind and play back the events. So in a way, wave creates feature-rich conversations that can be searched, revised, discussed and finally the end result after refinement can be used. All this is just the tip of the iceberg. Wave is essentially a platform on which developers can create either robots or extensions to perform certain tasks, taking Wave’s functionality to a new level. For instance, there is a robot called Rosy that translates text in real time and there’s a gadget that can create real time polls that can be embedded into a wave. All of this sounds really exciting, so what’s the catch?

Apparently none, apart from a few bugs. It’s just that people are having a hard time evaluating whether it’s only ‘fun’ or it can be used for enterprise level work. And what is this ‘work’ it can be put to. There is also speculation of whether this will be just another communication tool that needs your constant attention while operating in the already cluttered space of blogs, email, IMs, social networks and Twitter. Will Wave do away with all of those? In our opinion- not yet. But it will certainly reduce clutter. If you’re used to working in teams, you’ll relate to the confusing caused when on mail is marked to several people who reply independently.

Even with how well Gmail conversations are organized you will find mails, overlapping and then finally one person in the work group will be assigned the taks of extracting the relevant points from all the mails and put them in a document. Google Wave makes all this redundant as whatever common objective you’re discussing or ideating over, gets commented upon and refined then and there.

Some early users are finding the learning curve a bit problematic. Here again, the perception has more to with the generation divide. Most users who have grown using social media tools as their primary means of communication will find the interface intuitive. While the older timers who can’t get around the fact that “this doesn’t look like Outlook”, will definitely have a touch time. The bottom line is that once the platform is made public (even in Google’s forever-beta style), people will find ways to make it work for them. We’re eagerly waiting for our invite and Google has assured to include us in the next round of invites.

Article from Digit magazine.

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