On November 12th this year I experienced Christmas Morning, as I opened up my email to find a Google Wave invite. Things have never been the same. After passing out the 8 invitations I received to share with friends and family (instead of selling the invites on ebay link needed), our first Wave took off. The following is some of what we learned.

If you're unfamiliar with Wave, here is a good preview of some of the features it has to offer. Watching this will help you get a grasp on how to use this "killer" (Facebook-killer, MySpace-killer, Office-killer) application.

When we began, our first inclination was to write in a style that was conducive to instant message. We soon found that the disorganization of our rapid back and forth was creating too many new threads. It was confusing that only replies to your own messages indented, not replies to others. I spent more time deleting exploratory chatter than on composition, mostly because it was unclear how to delete more than one conversation statement at a time. The playback function was helpful in looking back to figure out it took us 85 steps before we began an actual "document" for this article. And the Ping function was neat in that it opens up a new wave which is "always on top" until the person replies.

I found it strange that the person who started this wave wasn't immediately added to my contacts, much in the way someone who I correspond with in GMail, is added to my Contacts automagically. I can understand that on a large wave you may not want 100 new people in your contacts, but there should be some kind of option to choose what new friends from each wave you want to add. I had to manually add the @googlewave.com address to my contacts later on, as there was no convenient "add friend" button next to their name.

Keep in mind that Wave is not even Beta. Its Preview (which Google mistakenly must think is the first letter of the Greek alphabet). Even the settings section is under construction and there was no apparent way to add a profile picture. How do we export this to google docs? How do we integrate this with a blog? How do we center this embedded video? How do we get out of the WYSIWYG editor to see the HTML source? These questions and more remain unanswered, but as an alpha-tester, consider me impressed.