Its been several weeks now that I’ve had a developer account on Google’s sandbox implementation of Wave and thought I’d share some more thoughts than the random tweets. I hope I’m not violating any sort of NDA by doing this because I think it is important to start the dialogue on something as potentially transformative as Wave as early as possible. Let me start by saying that when I first got my account I was extremely underwhelmed for a few reasons, but after using it now for weeks I am converted and find myself extremely frustrated that it isn’t really ready for wide release. The primary reason I was underwhelmed was that I had no one to work Wave with … sure there were hundreds of developers in there, but no one that I would participate with in any meaningful way. Wave is a collaborative platform and without collaborators it is close to useless. Now that a couple of ETS colleagues are also in the developer release I can say I am sold.

It has been almost two weeks since Google Wave was announced, so I thought I’d write a little about my thoughts on the subject. I have actually waited with this blog post because I haven’t been exactly sure what I think about it yet. Of course, I’m still not - but hopefully I will be able to get some of my thoughts collected by writing this post.

So let me start with the basics. Google Wave is a combination of email, instant messaging, forums, document creation and much more. The core concept is the wave, which in turn is comprised of blips. The blips are what actually contains content. Blips are threaded in terms of each other. The most different thing about Wave is probably that a wave is persistent and centralized. The model assumes that there is only one instance of each wave (although they can be federated and cached temporarily).