Demonic Angelicism Blending dreams with reality

I finally have it!

I have Google Wave. I got my invite on October 23, 2009, and at first, I had no idea of what to do with it. I signed up for an invite to Google Wave a while ago, and when I wasn’t let into the first wave (no pun intended) of users, I was upset, but I decided I didn’t really need it after all. How do you test a communications platform with no one to test it with? It completely defeats the purpose of testing if the only person you can talk to on Wave is yourself.

And then finally, I get my Wave invite a week ago. I was completely at a loss as to what I should do — I had gotten a Wave invite, one of the most sought after things in the modern world, and I knew I didn’t need Wave. I probably wouldn’t even need it much. (Getting bored? Keep reading. You might end up with one of my 20 invites.)

First Impressions

Oh my God! I just got a wave invite! Okay, now how does this work… and what should I do now? These were probably the first words that ran through my mind as I found the invite email buried among my college invitation emails (those colleges never seem to want to give up, do they). The answer to the last question was obvious — write a blog post. But I was getting ahead of myself. First I needed to accept the invite.

I did so and saw, for the first time not through YouTube, the Wave Interface. It actually wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be. It seemed almost too empty — nothing was happening, mostly because I logged onto Wave for the first time and did not yet have any open waves.

Interface

The interface was rather standard: the well known Google blue, three panels. The way the panels worked, however, was quite unusual: the the windows in the panels could be minimized into a bar on the top, closed, and even resized (though it wasn’t possible to actually move the panels around). There really wasn’t any reason to move them around; the interface was quite straightforward and easy to use.

Something that amazed me was how the scrollbars worked. It wasn’t the usual scrollbar that we’re all used to seeing. It was more of a two part scrollbar: a darker shadow that indicated how far down you were, and a actual solid clickable block. When the block was dragged, the shadow would smoothly move to follow it, with a slight delay, giving the panel a slick animated scrolling effect. There were also up and down buttons on the block, that moved the shadow, and the panel, but not the block.

Quite unusually, everything happens through a wave — the introductory video is in a wave, the settings are waves, and even the invite box is a wave.

First Waves

I remembered reading about a Lifehacker Readers Public Wave, so I searched for it. Chrome hung. I decided that it wasn’t worth trying again, so I went on Twitter and announced I was looking for a random stranger to talk to. Someone named Tim apparently was looking for someone to talk to as well, so I added him to my Google Contacts (Wave’s contacts are your Google Contacts) and we started to talk.

Wave was mostly a pain. It was laggy at times, and the keyboard shortcuts were not listed anywhere easy to find, but we did figure it out in the end and chatted there for a while.

The next day I quit Wave because I had no one to talk to about real things. Maybe in a year when more people I know get it…

Soo who wants a Wave invite? Preferably I want to invite someone I already know, want to talk to, and that I believe has a good reason to want to use it. If you don’t know me, and think you would make a good friend for me, please feel free to leave a comment. If you disagree with anything I said in this post, feel free to leave a comment too.