Already the signal is quite strong.  Most technophiles already have access but we’re all trying to find out how best to use this medium.  It’s obviously strong in collaboration and seems to be a great balance of email and instant messaging at the social or community level.  It’s good for working up collaborative documents too for business and other development.

Public waves are out there, many of which are quite informative, from camping groups, the things to do in my local city and even how to use Google wave itself.  One public wave is even committed to a manhunt of the killer of the four police in Seattle.

But there is also noise.  Many gawking tourist-type comments, hihi-type comments, empty replies and so forth.  As Google Wave accepts more people into the fold we’ll have a more mainstream mix and with it will come the spam.  Already I’ve seen a few primitive spam efforts.  If Google doesn’t improve its strategy public waves will be inundated with spam chocking out their usefulness.

What do you use Google Wave for?

Google Wave is a new communication tool;

Real time – what you see is updated as people type. Yes you can actually see the text inserted etc. Which makes for great visibility of your spelling errors but also helps the free flow of communication.

Collaborative – built from the ground up to let you work together with people to cocreate.

Embeddable – much like YouTube videos you can insert them anywhere. For example into a blog. I might even try that. It can also have stuff embedded into it like photos, videos and also;

Extensions – Like FireFox, Google Wave has extensions you can add in to make the experience as feature rich as you like. There’s aren’t many yet but I’m sure it will balloon. I’ve seen suduko, a simple poll, Google maps and conferencing

Another way to look at it is to compare with other communication tools. Despite what Google might claim it’s not really anothing new. What is new is that it has taken to best feature from many online communication tools such as email, twitter, instant messaging (MSN), facebook, etc

Now that I’ve actually seen it, I remain excited. It’s going to be a the huge improvement I had hoped it would be. It will replace many communication forms. Time will tell which ones but email at least.

It’s layout is similar to email. There’s contacts you can drag to add to waves (think of them as enhanced email message threads). The waves are sorted by search, folder or inbox, for example. For now Google Wave is preview and terribly unstable with large waves which have many people involved and ‘blips’ which are pieces added to the wave. It seems to run better on Chrome as one would expect.

I see it becoming a common collaborative tool and intend to use it as such myself.

Google Wave is grossly overhyped but only in the marketing mememe sense.. The sheer number of people who want it without having much clue what it actually does is staggering. The content is solid and not overhyped. The waves are coming.