I’ve been lucky enough to have been invited to sample Google Wave which is still in beta. I’m still learning how to use it, and many features are not working yet, so here are my first thoughts on the new product. One thing worth noting is that Wave is open sourced, which means we can expect many, many applications will be built around it in time, extending the core functionality in the same way as we have seen with Twitter, for example.

So what is Wave?

It’s basically a real time communication platform, that kind of crosses over between chat and E-mail. It extends G Mails “conversations” into real time, and allows people to chat in a rich text environment and share videos, files and photos. Each Wave is stored, so the content isn’t lost in the way that it is with chat, and anyone new invited into the Wave, can “replay” it and see how the conversation developed. Note that I mentioned it’s real-time. As I type in a Wave, anyone else subscribed to that Wave can see as I type.

And the benefit is…….?

Business Collaboration

From what I’ve seen so far, Wave’s biggest benefit will be for business collaboration. As work teams are spread across countries or even continents, businesses start to suffer from mis-communication in their planning and projects. Wave solves this problem in one fell swoop. Everyone sees the same thing, people brought into a project later, can follow each step, and a whole record is preserved. It’s much better than emailing documents, where changes can be made to different versions, and where someone can forget to add a recipient address.

Social Networking

I don’t see Wave taking over from current social networks like Twitter. I see it as a more intimate medium – rather than broadcasting to “everyone” you might set up a Wave with your closest friends and family to share real time experiences and photos while you’re away on holiday for example.

Fun!

With developers already working on applications, I can see Wave becoming a great fun tool. People are already working on games that can be played within Wave, adding interesting and funny emoticons that can be used, as well as a whole host of collaboration tools like flow charts and diagrams that can be incorporated into a Wave.

It’s early days, and I’ll be writing in a lot more detail about Wave in the future. But with the backing of Google and the talent for applications that exists for anything open sourced, I think we may all be trying to catch this one soon!

Are you on the Beta as well? Want to hook up and learn along with me? I’m at camelmediagroup@googlewave.com See you there!