Thanks to my friend Amit K. who works at Google, I got an invite to try out Google Wave quite early. There’s been a lot of anticipation and excitement about Wave ever since it was showcased as a conference. To add to it, they were only going to roll it out to 100,000 users in the first round, so the internet has been abuzz with articles about Wave since yesterday.

Here’s my first impression of it.

I still don’t see its point.

It would be unfair to say that Google claimed so, but most tech-watchers expected Wave to be the next big form of communication combining elements of existing social networking paradigms in a brand new interface. That doesn’t happen with Wave.

You have gadgets like maps, polls, etc. for multiple users to collaborate in a single Wave. I don’t see how it is better than using existing services like Gmail, which gives a far superior experience IMHO. If you want users to switch to you, you need to offer something substantially better in terms of quality, user experience, scalability, etc. That is one of the reasons Bing failed big time. You remember Bing, right ?

For normal chats, don’t even think of Wave. It is an overkill in terms of time and performance. I ended up liking Gtalk more after the Wave exercise !

It is too bling and heavy for my liking, so I’m not sure I’d be using it a lot.

It also crashed multiple times, but it’s only fair to give that to Google, since they had just started rolling it out for testing.

I think Wave is trying to solve a problem I am not sure it knows. Or it expects us to figure out the problem. I found many friends coming up with new scenarios where Wave might be useful – people are coming up with problems for which Wave is a solution. That isn’t very healthy for a product, in my humble opinion.

Still, I wouldn’t be foolish to write it off. We need to follow how it converges in terms of usage, see some applications built on the Wave API come forth before deciding its fate.

Meanwhile, let’s wait and watch as any wise person would do.

P.S. : An interesting fact that a friend mentioned while talking about Wave. He said the last superb product that Google came out with, was in 2003, with GMail. I might add Google Reader here, since I use it a lot. But interesting fact, no ? I hadn’t realized this till he mentioned it.