*This is a guest post by a friend of the site Samuel Huang. He shares the exact same view as I do on this product. I being Jason Anderson, Publisher of G Style Magazine. For the last week, myself, Samuel, and Adele have been toying with Google Wave. You can contact Samuel on Twitter –http://www.twitter.com/samversionone*
I’m going to spare the details of what Google Wave does as most of you who are already using Google Wave know what it is used for or at least know basically what it is used for. The point of this post is just to voice some observations so far about Google Wave itself and what Google needs to do to make it better.
Pros:
* Real time waves (chats).
* Able to share media fairly quickly.
* Multiple participants in each wave.
* Plug-in support, but very limited at the moment.
* Can reply back to individual comments or the whole conversation.
* Great for group collaborations or creative thinking.
Cons:
* No alert notifications when comments are replied to.
* Large waves start to load a lot slower.
* The invite system is not instantaneous.
* Useless without any contacts.
* Can’t tell if one of your contacts is online or not.
* What the heck is the green dot next to my profile picture.
* What does the @googlewave.com email address actually do?
Google Wave is still very early beta so I’m sure all these concerns will be addressed as we move along. So far, there is much potential in it especially if used in a group work environment. I would like to see it integrated with a mobile app so that we can get notifications about new waves. I’d also like to see a stand alone app that makes full use of the Google Wave site and not the mobile version of Google Wave. I don’t like to be tied down to my computer or my web browser.