I love you Google Wave

My love hate relationship with Google just switched over to love today as I just got my Google Wave account invite today, and am going to spend the rest of the day playing around with this puppy to see if it will work for the school I work at. As we take a look at how to kill off the sterility that online education has become, thinking that Google wave might just fill in some of the gaps in how we can use social collaboration tools like Google Wave to expand and increase the value of online education.

This is the e-mail you want to see today. Well ok, this is an e-mail that a lot of folks wanted to see today, but many didn’t. You will have to trust us when we start saying that on first connection, the product pretty much so rocks. But when you start digging into it, there are going to be a lot of opportunities for third party programmers to extend this system a lot. Good initial platform, where it goes from here is going to be very interesting.

So you get this totally happy e-mail, click on the link and you end up here.

The initial screen is pretty flat because you have not customized it yet, but this is the landing page. Again with a limited audience playing around with this, what makes the landing page classic Google is that it is so flat and clean. It is also very easy to understand what to do right off the starting line because there is nothing to distract you from diving in.

You also have the options starting off to go into the settings pane and start working with some of the plugins and other toys that are included in the system. There are only a couple of plugins, but as the system grows that will change. Given that Google has focused on framework, the third party eco system that could build around this is going to have a lot of potential for individual programmers much like the Apple Store has had for Ipod/Iphone programmers.

The instructional video just cracks me up – they so pinged the stereotype of a computer geek. While I want to break down barriers to the standard geeky stereotype, in this case it works. Because by using the stereotype, they defuse what could be scary to people in the longer run. Right now they are letting in an early adopter audience, later on this video is going to come in handy.

And yes when you start talking to people, everyone you add sees the same message, so if you call Robert Scoble Mona – well he is going to notice that and have a comment or two. Which is going to be something that I can see people doing. There is no “are you sure you want to include this person into the conversation” support right now either. Someone could seriously screw up here or send information to the wrong people. Another plugin or extension would work here to help people keep from making bad gaffes with the system.

Ok off to go play some more, but this is looking like it is going to be very cool to play around with. On first blush though, this looks like it is going to be an interesting product to play around with and see how far you can take it. Seeing what I saw with Robert though tells me that this is going to work for school as long as students stay logged in or visit on a regular basis. Since it is simply HTTP traffic, there is no reason why someone could not leave it open.

Even better though would be to see a pane on Tweetdeck or something similar that would tie into Google Wave to keep people updated on conversations that are happening in the sandbox of accounts and people you are connected to.

(Cross-posted @ TechWag)

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