Are you ready to ride the Wave?

The invites are on the way, all 100k of them, and the Wave is about to roll, but what does it all mean?

I signed up about six-months ago, and am hoping to get my invite soon, so hope to update with live data asap.

What is Google Wave?

Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

From my perspective, I'm looking for something more robust than Twitter and FriendFeed, less distracting that Facebook, and something that allows me to expand my business network, manage project resources, build new business relationships, share important ideas, collaborate, and communicate with customers both internal and external in a meaningful way. Oh, and keep it all efficient and organized. Not too much to ask, eh?

From first peeks at the Wave however, my concern is that it may appear complex by many and have a high abandon rate. I believe those who abandon will come back after popularity and proof of usefulness becomes more widely known, but the learning curve for that group will be steeper as more development ensues.

Salesforce.com is getting in front of the Wave. Here's a great video describing it:

Gravity is a prototype developed by SAP Research in Brisbane, Australia and SAP NetWeaver Development. It provides real-time, cloud-based, collaborative business process modelling within Google Wave.



Mashable has some great articles related to the Wave here, and the intro video we posted a couple of months ago is below. Will you try it?