After hassling people on Twitter for an invite I finally got my hands on a golden ticket/invite and eagerly jumped into Google Wave. It looks amazing. All those panels, sliders and plenty of workspace. Uncluttered, giving you access to only the tools you need.

Once the initial euphoria had subsided, and I actually tried to do something, I realised just how unintuitive the system is. I only had the chap who invited me in my contacts list, so first task: find some other people and start having meaningful conversations.

Getting no joy from the interface, I hit the help files. And with some poking around managed to import my contacts. None of which were in Google Wave using the email addresses I had.

Figuring it was a limitation of the beta, I decided to get into a conversation with my gracious host. So replied to his greeting message. In a day he responded although I had no idea as I didn’t get an email alert (which is fair enough - why not just use email), but it wasn’t obvious in the main view either. I only discovered it after ‘playing’ the wave back. Seriously unintuitive.

I guess after all the hype, I’ve been pretty underwhelmed by Google Wave. Maybe when it comes out of beta some of the niggles might be resolved, but if the system is indeed the future of business communication, someone (who does understand it) will make a mint offering training courses.

UPDATE: Thought this was a good tweet that summed it up nicely. @adamcoomes: Hahaha love this “Google Wave was built to show younger people how older people feel when they try to use the internet”