Wave Hello
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Google Wave! It's been eagerly anticipated by many, and finally the beta is open to the lucky few who managed to bribe, beg or steal an invite. With thanks to a very good friend who has immediately rocketed their way up my Christmas list I logged into my Wave account for the first time this week. I'm fairly impressed, with one caveat.
I'm not going to recap all the various clever bits of functionality Wave provides. Many other sites have done this to death, and there's that incredibly long Google IO video that shows you everything you could possibly want to know. What I will do is offer a couple of words of advice and caution. I have to do that, otherwise you'd realise I'm just posting screenshots of Wave to make you jealous.
First, getting any value whatsoever from Wave requires you to know people who also have their own Wave account. This is slightly more problematic than you might think. There are two ways to get a Wave account: either receive an invite from Google directly or be given a referral invite by a friend. For the former, after logging into your Wave account you are given just 8 invites to send to friends and family, a la GMail Beta system. For the latter you get no invites at all. Not only that, if you are lucky enough to be allocated some invites, giving one to a friend does not immediately cause the Wave system to actually deliver the invite. In other words you can give your invites to people but those people won't immediately be allowed into the Wave preview - actually receiving the invite can take a few days. This is clearly how Google is controlling and smoothing out the numbers of people signing up, but it all contributes to one thing. Unless you're extremely lucky you are unlikely to have more than a handful of contacts in your account, reducing the Wave preview from a seriously clever community tool to an interesting beta with some novelty value. Google has said it will limit the Wave preview to 100,000 people, so this problem is unlikely to change any time soon. In practice this means your Wave preview is less likely to look like the rich content system shown in the demo videos and more like my rather pathetic screenshot.
Second, this is exactly why you shouldn't bother buying an invite off eBay. A quick scan of completed listings shows Wave invites have sold for upwards of £30 to people who are clearly desparate to get hold of one, but they'll be sorely disappointed. When you accept a referral invite you're automatically connected to the issuer so unless you like long and close relationships with your eBay sellers, don't bother.
Third, according to some sources the reason people are desparate to get hold of a Wave invite is to secure their username (which gives you a wave.google.com/[your_username] address, too). You really don't need to worry about this. Wave requires and automatically uses a Google account, so as long as you have a GMail account or similar you've already got your name secured.
Those words of caution aside, there is one aspect of Wave's customisation system that's worth being aware of. When you log into Wave and edit your profile you're automatically taken to the general Google account profile settings. This system asks you for all sorts of personal information including employment history, full address, phone numbers and so on. Once you edit this information and save it, it's automatically added to your public Google profile - completely accessible by anyone, and visible in Google people search. There is no method to actually control whether or not the information you provide is private or public; if you add the information, it's assumed to be fit for public consumption. The Google help page has the following to say on the topic:
How do I control what information people see on my profile?
You decide what information goes on your public profile. We don't share anything that you haven't explicitly added. For example, when you create your profile, we suggest links to some of the Google products you currently use, such as your blog on Blogger.com or your photos on Picasa Web Albums; however, you have to add these links for them to appear on your profile page.
Although adding any information to your profile is completely optional the tight integration with Wave is slightly concerning. Wave is designed to be a private community communications tool for your friends, family and acquaintances. As such you'd feel pretty happy editing your Wave profile and putting in some personal information for your contacts to view. But if you do this in the Wave system it's automatically syndicated out to your publicly accessible Google profile. In other words you have a choice: share some personal information with your acquaintances and have it accessible to the world, or keep your privacy by not adding it in the first place (thus denying the information to your friends).
This seems to be the strangest choice Google have made. Every other social networking site allows you to control the amount of information visible to the public but Google demands your biography is either completely public, or nonexistent. Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned but I prefer the good old email system where you knew exactly what information you were providing, and to whom. GMail does it this way, so I don't see why Wave can't keep your profile private and accessible only to your contacts.
There is still construction work going on, with some of the customisation options inaccessible or telling you to "come back soon". But, fundamentally, the functionality is there and it looks pretty good. It's just a shame that Google's approach to privacy is so strange.
