It’s funny how easily one’s opinion can be changed overnight, amazingly it’s happened to me 3 times this week.  Initially, I figured that Wave was going to be wrecked by spam (even in its first few days) and “add me” posts as Twitter and even the Android market is.  This was short lived after I received my preview invite, when I started reading the Waves posted and seeing how people were actually using the new technology.  Even at this point, I saw Wave as a collaboration tool with networking features, however after hours of more use I realized that it’s even more than just collaboration and its potential as a networking tool is great.

The basics:

A Wave is an article (Single author or collaboration) which is editable in real time by it’s authors.  The comments are also in “real time,” and access is determined by the original author.

Wave was just released to 100k users for public beta testing, which means there will probably be issues with it initially.

Google has said that Wave will work with Android, however to my knowledge there hasn’t been any specifics yet.

Browser Choice:

It seems a lot of people are having issues with different browsers, this is expected because it’s a “preview.” However, it seems that it’s a bit tasking on any browser at this point creating lag.  As of now, I’m using Google Chrome for my primary browser, and it seems to be running in line with FireFox 3.5.  There are a couple noticeable differences, primarily in how a LARGE wave loads.  With Firefox the Wave seems to take longer to load, however makes the wave readable quicker.  In Chrome, the overall process is a lot quicker, although the articles are obscured longer then Mozilla.   I could imagine with Mozilla’s habit of hogging ram, that Chrome would be better for chronic Wave users.

Mobile:

I’m an Android lover, we all know this, however I’m surprised that the mobile site for Wave hasn’t been completely developed yet.  When pulling up the page on my G1 (running Cyanogen’s latest Rom), the site will load with the warning above and allow me to access a page displaying my inbox and contacts button at the top, however will only show completed Waves an takes EXTREMELY long to load.  I wouldn’t even attempt to load it on a mobile connection, seeing as it’s taking a long time on WiFi.

The site, in the browser, has an iphone feel to it, which makes me think that there’s an Application in development from Google for the Android, meaning that there will likely be increased features in comparison to the mobile browser.  I have tried, without success, to create a Wave from my phone’s browser.  This is not to say that it’s impossible, but extremely inefficient.

*** More Android Screenshots coming soon!***

Larger Wave’s should probably be left for browsing on the computer, seeing as my only successful attempts at loading Wave’s have been with one’s that had little activity.

The other issue I noticed was it only works in landscape mode, whereas in portrait the only thing which loads is a header of the wave.