Google Wave, or On lowered expectations & expectations on hold
A good friend of mine decided to spent one of his precious invitations for the Google Wave Sandbox on me. Expectations to that new service were high after seeing a video that promised to reinvent email, wiki, personal pages, IM as communications channels, and renew them in a way that made things easier, more collaborative and not as fractioned anymore.
I have tried it, and I must say that my expectations were not met. Without all the bots now flooding Google Wave, wave is somehow a very slow realtime web-based Multi-User-Chat. My first thought was: This looks a little bit like the realtime chat-feature in that dinosaur ICQ version from almost ten years ago. Only in colour, and with maps, and...Well, probably not bad after all. 
Another expectation is also not yet met: Wave being an open protocol, based on XMPP, which enables everyone to set up their own wave service. Similar to email, for instance. Imagine email not being implementable by each and everyone with a webserver. That would, obviously, be very bad. Or would it? So if Wave claims to be the new black email+, it can not only depend on Google as an organization, can it? As cloudy as it may be. As I hear, the open part of the waveprotocol is not yet very wave-ey. Which is sad. I hope, that point, too, improves.
Since I lowered my expectations, though, from a very high level, I find it a quite useful tool. I hope, the Google Wave developers will manage to make it a bit faster, though. The user experience is definitely lacking there.
Another reason for my disappointment probably was, that my experience is based on having only a few people to communicate with. At first, there where my friends. Most of them are quite savvy with communication, so we fiddled a bit, but we did not have much to collaborate on, since we live so far apart and don't really have projects we are working together on right now. But more and more people got on Wave, and in the last week I made contact with librarians in Norway, and not least (most of the) co-organizers of and speakers at the "Free and Open Libraries" conference about F(L)OSS software in libraries next week in Bergen, Norway. So we started collaborating, and suddenly the whole map inclusion in wave made a whole lot more sense.
The second most interesting thing are public waves. I have searched for waves matching my temporary, or overall professional or private interest. I found interesting waves:
Open wave for librarians using Wave
And many more public waves. Something that I did not find, though, was a public wave for knitters, and it took off very fast from zero to 101 wavers contributing as of today.
Although in the more tech-savvy wave topics people try to figure out things before they participate, many of they waves with specific topics end up becoming undertaken by people take about the Google Wave sandbox and about figuring things while they are at it. This is tiring, and I find myself not participating anymore where Waves become so bloated and cluttered with dozens or even sometimes hundreds of such messages.
What has not happened yet is the development of a certain code of behaviour, what people called "netiquette" (or something) before for this service. Some places people are concerned about it. Most places they are not. Gina Trapani and Adam Pash from Lifehacker have written the Complete Guide to Google Wave. And there is probably more to come. Not only explanations, but also features.
I am still waiting for things to get more exciting. I didn't use twitter much the first six months I had my account, and now I twitter a lot. With all the tummy-ache that follows, relying on a centralized server. So I really hope it grows on me, because XMPP is great, and I think it could become very useful.