Spent a good few hours today playing around in the Google Wave sandbox. First impressions are that there’s a lot of work to do before it goes live, but there is some really cool stuff there. As other people commented, Wave has to be a massive success if it’s to succeed at all. There is, at least at the moment, no proper integration with normal email (you can receive normal emails at a Wave address but messages go into a standard GMail account that has no meaningful integration with Wave). So, you’re going to have to get a lot of your contacts using Wave to make it worth your while logging in regularly.

So, is it so compelling and – more importantly – so easy to use that everyone will be signing up? Well, my concern is that there is a lot of new stuff in Wave and it takes time for developers to work out how to make new functionalities accessible in an intuitive way that people can use. At the moment a lot of things are not intuitive at all. For example, how would you guess that to make a Wave publicly accessible you need to add the contact public@a.gwave.com as a participant in the wave? Searching for waves involves special syntax complex enough to warrant a cheat sheet. It’s also tough to distinguish between robots and real people, for example Jan Kopanski – a robot that edits out curse words – could easily be confused with Jan Kopanski, a human being from Sheffield. How much of these usability issues get tidied up before release is going to be key to Wave’s success.

As for the cool stuff, things that jump out in the first hours of use are the obvious ones that we all saw in the demo. Dragging and dropping files – especially images – into Wave is great, but that’s a browser technology that’ll be coming to every web site, not just Wave. Being able to insert gadgets like an interactive map is also great. The tools for collaborative working are powerful and seeing other people typing and editing in real time editing is pretty neat, though it’s questionable how useful this is going to be. As with Google Wave as a whole, time (and more contacts to communicate with) will tell …