I finally had a chance to play around with my Google Wave account, now that I’m slightly freer. Well, to be really honest, at first, I was a little lost. I didn’t have many contacts with Wave accounts yet (at least not in my highly contacted group of friends). Plus, I was clueless on what I wanted to do. Well, the most natural step to take would be to invite more friends to join Wave. That was exactly what I did. I invited a couple of friends to Wave. (Yes, I was pretty lucky to have a Wave account from a friend who is a Googler, hence the extra invites.)
Didn’t take long before a few of them got the invites soon afterwards. I think it takes the Wave team at least a day or two to send an invite once you nominate your friends. Anyway, now we have more interesting stuffs to do.
The first wave: I started a wave on the recipe of the chicken katsu my girlfriend and I cooked last weekend. I might not look like it, but I do cook often enough, and the katsu was really good! Even my girlfriend’s sister, who has a high standard for food, liked it. Well, back to the point, it was kind of fun to write the recipe in Wave. But wait a sec, I can do that just using Google Docs, can’t I? Or even this blog. Well, let’s put that thought on hold for a moment…
The second wave: my girlfriend went online and she started playing with her Wave account. She was initially confused. So we both started a wave (oh, and I shared the katsu recipe wave with her) and started experimenting. This is where Wave really shines. We were able to edit any of the sub-waves together and the changes appear live on the other person’s Wave account. I can see exactly where she’s editing and can even reply to her post before she finished writing. We also played (well, I did) with the playback function. Really cool!
The third wave: well, I am supposed to write an article for this small blog-based publication that my friend is running. Since she has a Wave account too (and, like me, has no idea what to do with it), I suggested that we might want to try writing the article as a wave. My idea would be to write the article (outline and the actual article), brainstorms, and have her editing the article as necessary. Thought that is a neat idea, but we’ll only be able to test that next week since I’m still kind of busy this week. Seems fun though! Imagine live collaboration on an article, bouncing ideas through a wave or gtalk, while writing the article at the same time. Plus, I’ll be able to see her edits appearing live on my wave.
Well, anyway, back to the thought that I put on hold some moments ago: Google Wave equals Google Docs? Is that true? Well, yes and no! Wave can indeed work like Google Docs (well, right now minus the spreadsheet/presentation stuffs, but I bet there will be a gadget to take care of that soon). And that is indeed the point! Wave is Google Docs + GTalk + GMail + wiki! It’s like this all-in-one, all encompassing collaborative solutions. Cool? Hell yeah. Will it work? Only time will tell.
Well, I had fun waving today. But I shall stop here. Still have a presentation to write for Monday and I need to get a draft of it by tomorrow. ):
