So back in October I posted about my first impressions with google wave. I mentioned in there I was a little depressed by the number of people I had available to converse with, however, that seems to be changing as now I’m on my second round of invites to hand out.

Once the first group of people started receiving their invites, things picked up. Also, the big G added the ability to make “public” waves where anyone can see them, this is a big plus as it opens the whole community to more things. One feature that would be nice to see would be the ability to create groups or mail lists so that I don’t have to click through and add 20 people to one wave.

So far, outside of easily being able to share things like youtube videos, photos and other files with people at the drop of the hat, the most addicting thing on Wave is the sudoku plugin that enables you to play sudoku with your friends in real time. its pretty cool competing against the clock and your friends and watching as they fill in blanks you were going to get to.

It does seem to be a bit of a resource hog, but that could be to the scripting required to make wave run right. I’ve noticed that IE requires the Chrome Frame from google to even load Wave properly and Firefox crashes like Gruntled after a night of moving servers from one building to another if the wave is too large. The only browser that seems to handle it properly so far is Google Chrome (which I guess is to be expected) as it can load waves with 200+ messages in it with out any problem.

The more I use Wave, the more I have to say I actually like it. It takes the convenience of email and the realtime factor of IM and mashes it in to one. There’s room for improvement, but it seems that GoogleWave is getting better and more stable every day (though there were issues with the Sudoku game yesterday that were driving me insane!). GoogleWave will be a boon to organizations who’s users need to collaborate in realtime (even easier then things like goto meeting) and once the full api is available to developers, I would imagine that we’ll see no shortage of plugins and extensions for the Wave of the future.

Oh, yea, if you’re on GoogleWave, say hello mcangeli@googlewave.com

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