Within the last week the Google Wave invitations finally started arriving at GearDiary (sorry – we wish we had invites but we’re cleaned out). We’ve been working with Google Wave for the better part of a week and our reactions can be summed up by a phrase we all seem to keep typing into Wave – now that we’re in – what do we do?

It’s a common question so here’s a quick guided tour of what we’ve been doing with Wave but more importantly what some of our concerns are. You’ll see that (for now) you aren’t missing much. This is all very early stage development. It’s not ready for prime time and the vast majority of Wave conversations ask nothing more than – ‘what do we do? – how does Google Wave help us?’.

The promise of Google Wave is you have one place to collaborate with friends and co-workers.

For example, instead of copying a group of people on an email – and then remembering to reply-all so each of them can read your response – Google Wave provides collaborative tool that everyone can read and respond to. It also will eventually extend to include embedding widgets into both the wave and content from the wave into web sites though we found that most of those capabilities are both difficult to implement and buggy.

This is all early preview stuff and because of that Google Wave is open to only a tiny sliver of the Internet for testing.

We think that’s a good thing because if everyone joined the service as it stands today – they’d probably leave and never come back.

The Google Wave of today is buggy, slow and it’s not immediately obvious what the benefits of using it are.

Still interested? Here’s how you get into Google Wave.

Everyone who received an invitation directly from Google (as opposed to being invited by someone already in the Google Wave preview) is allowed to invite 8 friends.

Tip: When you fantasize about how great a collaboration tool Google Wave could be for you or your company – remember there are three types of people in the world – those that can count and those that can’t.

Um, wait, I mean two types.

Those two types are those that tell you (#1) how they can’t wait to collaborate in Google Wave (100%) — and (#2) those that actually collaborate and make an effort to use Google Wave (conservatively 1%).

Most people sign into Google Wave, post an obligatory “what now” wave – pronounce wave silly – and from that point go back to using email.

Until there’s a critical mass of friends and co-workers using Google Wave – there’s simply nothing to see or do.

We hope this changes and Google Wave evolves to where it’s self-evident as to it’s purpose. For the majority of people Google Wave is attractive because (A) It’s new and (B) It’s difficult to get in.

Right now few people seem to be using Google Wave for anything meaningful that they couldn’t do in email or instant messenger.

The public wave’s we’ve been able to view are all mundane with little value beyond test messages or rough samples of waves being embedded into blogs. Interestingly most of those waves only contain 20 or fewer participants. There are only a few public waves that seem to have over 200 people actively waving.

Observation: Lifehacker started a public wave on October 15. By the 18th it wouldn’t load in my browser – ultimately displaying that it was shut down as being overcapacity – with about 430 people. The message from Google Wave indicated that it reached capacity the same day Lifehacker set it up.

Tip: If you get into Google Wave due to an invitation from a friend you will not have any invitations to send. Only those people invited directly by Google receive invitations to re-distribute.

We don’t know if Google will provide additional invitations for existing users at a later time, but for now the way into Google Wave is either through an invitation from someone admitted directly by Google or to be invited by Google directly (usually because you’ve applied at their site – link below).

You can request an invitation from the Google Wave home page – http://www.googlewave.com.
As near as we can tell some of the applications for invitations sent to Google have been accepted though the lag time seems to have been a few months. Invitations sent from those already in Google Wave seem to be clearing in about a week or less.

Since inviting yourself is free – we recommend submitting your email address directly to Google.

Here’s the application that you’ll fill out with Google Wave if you want to be considered for an account. This is only necessary if you have not already been invited by someone with Google Wave invitations.

Once you’re into Google Wave – the real fun starts. The biggest initial reaction that we’ve had is “what now”.

Tip: with:public
When you open Google Wave for the first time you’ll be presented with a blank screen.

Find some open conversations by changing your search box to “with:public”. This brings up a constantly updated stream of public chats waves.

The messages show a brief list of topics and on the right side if there are unread messages you’ll see a count of how many are unread in a green bubble. There is also a count of the total number of messages.

Dive in and read any wave by clicking on the main subject. Beware though – once you read it, Google Wave assumes you’re in love with that wave and it will from that point forward appear in your inbox unless you delete, archive or mute it (the functionality of which has only worked sporadically for us).

Tip: Reply to any wave with the reply button. If you want to make a point in the midst of a paragraph – use CTRL – ENTER to indent your discussion. You’ll have to be in edit mode to do so.

The wave will appear in your inbox whether you are contributing to it or not. What’s creepy about waves is that you see the other person typing out their reply in real time. Hopefully Google will create an option to disable real time viewing. Presently you also have no idea who is online. Google had temporarily disabled the online indicator which would show green next to your contact list for any contacts actively using Google Wave.

You can try to get rid of a wave. If you created it you can click delete. Clicking archive (get it out of my inbox until someone replies) or mute (I don’t want to hear from the wave ever again) seems to work half the time. If you aren’t able to archive or mute a wave – try logging back in later.

Below is an example of a public wave discussing etiquette. Since Google Waves can be edited by nearly anyone who has joined them – there’s a huge amount of cooperation (too much in our opinion) that must happen to keep a wave orderly and on topic.

To make things even more fun, anyone who is a participant in a wave can presently invite others in. Don’t make the mistake of talking badly about a colleague only to find them subsequently added to the wave.

One of the major features Google must add is the ability to structure a wave so off-topic replies cannot take over. That means the wave creator should have the ability to move or delete portions of replies without resorting to copy and paste.

If you’ve ever participated in an “old fashioned” discussion forum then you know how one bad apple can spoil the entire bunch. Until there’s a way to lock down editing and membership, public waves will be nothing more than open testing grounds and unable to evolve into meaningful conversation or collaboration.

Without an ability to control the conversation – people who mean well can lead the discussions to areas that the wave is not meant to cover.

The issue is that if we wanted to have loosely organized conversations that are diffult to manage – we’d stay with GMail which is already doing that quite well thank you very much.

Another issue is the adding of people to a wave. As we mentioned before anyone can add someone to a wave. We’re not sure this is a good thing for every wave.

At this time, you can’t remove participants from a wave. Once you add someone to a wave, they’ll be able to see all content from the beginning of the wave to present. Participants will not be able to see any private replies in the wave unless you explicitly add them to those messages.

Good luck getting people to understand the difference between public and private replies. Instead of remembering what’s confidential and what’s public within a wave – my guess is most people will resort to email for the confidential stuff. So much for collaborating.

We’ve left out a ton of things about how you can embed Google Widgets and drag and drop content such as images into awave. Until Google can get the simple delete/mute/archive feature working we just don’t think it’s feasible for anyone except developers to expand their use of Google Wave beyond simple use.

So if you’ve received an invitation, feel free to add wayneschulzct@googlewave.com, and I’ll be happy to chat. Just don’t ask me where this whole Google Wave is going to lead – because I have no idea.