Google Wave: first impressions

Yesterday, Google launched "Google Wave" its highly anticipated social platform. The first of about 100.000 lucky users received their invitations today and had the opportunity to find out if Wave lives up to the hype.

After a few hours or trying out the system, one thing is evident: Google Wave rules! It combines the best features of e-mail, forums, file sharing, wiki's and instant messenging and it works extremely well as soon as you've scaled the learning curve. Here's a video of some of the features, which should help you get started:

Once you're up and running, it's surprisingly easy to communicate and cooperate in real-time using Google Wave. You see people typing their messages in real-time, browse through waves with a single click, edit your replies, replay events (playback mode), tag your waves or organize them into folders, and much more.

Will Google Wave replace other social platforms?

In the long run, Google Wave will definitely make a huge impact, though it's still too early to make any accurate predictions. There are some downsides to Google Wave, for example the waves can get rather large and hard to manage after a while. Also, Internet Explorer, which is still the most widely used browser in the world, is not supported at this time. However, we're sure the people at Google have only just started and there are plenty of improvements and features on their to-do list. If not Google, the community will certainly elevate the platform to the next level as soon as Google releases the source code and extensions are developed.