This morning I received an invite to google wave from someone that I haven’t actually met yet, so that was pretty cool because I was curious to see for myself what google was up to. I’ve tried not to read any reviews or explanations from others because I wanted to explore it with fresh eyes like most people would experience it. I sketched out my initial reaction to google wave not so much as a criticism but but honest reaction to opening it up. The first thing I saw was boxes which I wasn’t sure I was supposed to do, though after watching the video I had a better understanding than if I had just read some text. The second thing I did was try adding some contacts which was successful for those that were already invited to google wave. The biggest question mark I had after that was trying to find widgets (there didn’t seem to be that many—or at least I couldn’t find them). I use google maps a lot so I wanted to import my own map that I had invested some time in creating. In the instructions all I had to do was add a url—which I thought would be easy as it’s already a google product. Unfortunately all I got back was a broken widget icon. Hopefully as new versions of google wave are released the integration between products will be a smoother.

I also noticed that google wave is not “beta” but in “preview ” which is a shift. The overall ui is pretty understandable, it’s the feature set that’s going to take some time to get used to. I also think there’s a lot of potential to use something similar to curate content that’s going to be published elsewhere. It will be interesting to see who jumps on that aspect of the interface.