Google Wave first impressions

My sister-in-law sent me a Google Wave invite last week and it finally arrived this evening. So I have caught my first wave and played around with things a bit. I must admit the experience is a little underwhelming right now, but that is probably because I have not interacted with anybody on the service yet. Below I will jot down some notes.

Useful guides

Here are some websites I found that seemed particularly useful, or that look like they will be useful in the future, or that are written by people who generally write useful stuff:

• Google Wave Wikipedia article to answer that difficult question of "What is it?"
• Google Wave's support site for the official help line
• Google Wave 101 by Gina Trapani (TWIG panelist) for Lifehacker
• Google Wave first look by Gina Trapani for Lifehacker
• Wave Gadgets tutorial for extending Wave
• Google Wave: A Complete Guide by Ben Parr at Mashable
• Wavety.com the Complete, up-to-Date, list of Google Wave gadgets and robots
• TWIG 10 is an episode of This Week in Google focusing on Wave
• Wave Extensions featured by Google

Thoughts

As I mentioned before, I have not really done too much since I have not collaborated with anybody yet. As can be expected, there do not seem to be many of the obvious and necessary gadgets yet. For example, I would like to embed YouTube videos but have not figured that out yet. I also have not been able to integrate it with Google Groups. That is unfortunate, since I received my invite specifically so that I could use Wave with my in-laws who have an active mail list in Groups. I do like the Sudoku game.

Video

Here is a video about things to do in Google Wave: