I can’t believe it was nearly 6 months between blog posts. The flurry of activity that started this blog, and my iPhone development hobby, was ended pretty quickly when Google asked me to interview. I may blog about that at some point (I have plenty of notes), but it means asking for permission from the recruiters as I may have clicked through a Non-Disclosure Agreement without realising it.

Suffice to say, it took up about 4 months of my spare time thanks to a very drawn out interview (and re-interview) process. It ended badly in that I didn’t get a job, but other positives came from it too…

So I got an invite to try out Google Wave. It’s very reminiscent of earlier chat applications from when I first got an Internet connection – I’m thinking ICQ and PowWow.

The live chat thing is great and is the feature that most makes me nostalgic for the early chat clients. Seeing people type, make typos, correct themselves and rephrase what they’ve said is very engrossing. This is a novel experience (and I only have one contact at the moment, until my invites get to my friends) but seeing what people are writing as they write it means conversation can flow faster and you feel more involved. You know when people are typing and when the wave has their focus, so you know if you need to be paying attention or whether you can get on with something else for a few minutes. It’s a lot more immediate than just seeing “so-and-so is typing a message…”.

That said, it could be a nightmare to deal with lots of communication in Wave. I think having the option to enable this within GMail would be very useful – but not for every email conversation. I like the idea of publishing Waves to blogs and using them as the commenting mechanism – this was in one of the intro videos. The idea of a group of friends editing a holiday/weekend plan together sounds nightmarish, an etiquette needs to evolve or be enforced by the wave itself. I can’t see it replacing email entirely – email is far too well entrenched now, and it has a lot of advantages over Wave.

It seems like a more direct replacement for IM clients. Most of the time you’ll use it as a straight chat window, so maybe there should be an option to lock it down to that functionality. It would also be great for document collaboration but how then far is Google Docs from having that same functionality?

These are just some initial thoughts, it will be interesting to see how it changes and what ways it works with other applications. What would be crazy is if this became a proper paradigm in the way that email, IM or social networks did – it’s too complicated for most people, but maybe as time goes by it will seem more normal.