Google Wave

Google Wave was a very interesting way of communicating with other people. Overall I did like it, it was fairly easy to use and it provided a professional environment to communicate electronically with others. The way you can post “waves” is similar to posting your “status” on Facebook. A major difference is the more professional website is Google Wave. On the Wave you don’t have to worry about ads, or pointless invites to join groups and whatnot. The Wave is simple, straightforward, and user friendly. It is also nice that there is the ability to pick and choose who can see the wave of posts, you only have to let people that need to see the wave, actually see it. All of these features are great to have when communicating through the internet, but seeing as Google Wave is in a beta phase, it could always be improved.

One part of the Wave that can be a little annoying is when it shows the new messages for each wave, the problem is that the number of new messages will not change unless you click on each one them. Just reading the messages is not enough, so even if you have read them all, there still may appear to be more new messages in your wave. Similarly, when replying to messages, when you click “reply”, the response will go directly under the message you clicked on. It’s not that this is a negative feature; you just need to be careful when replying to messages in order to get it in the right order. One last thing I noticed is that there is no clear way to delete a wave. You can “unfollow” a specific wave; however I’m not sure that it gets deleted completely, especially if you were the one who created it.

As a whole I do like the system and the unique features that it provides. For example you can see other messages as the person is typing it, so you can watch what they are typing while they are typing it, rather than just reading it after they click done. That is one unique feature that Facebook, or similar social networking sites do not have. This has the potential of being a very popular system for communication, especially for those looking for a professional environment for communication.