Yesterday I pledged that I wouldn’t write about Wave until I’ve had a chance to play with it myself. I always like it when Google does something innovative and is then rewarded with scads of hype, but talking about the potential of a product that you haven’t touched or seen outside of some screenshots is akin to writing science fiction sometimes, particularly when it comes to web based applications that threaten to “change the game,” and I’m not imaginative enough to write really compelling science fiction.

Last night, about fifteen minutes before I was ready to pass out for the evening, I got my invite (thanks to Josh Bancroft and Nikolay Kolev). Of course, at 2 AM, just about everyone was asleep or otherwise logged off. I pinged my twitterstream about having an invite, and amongst the forty or so begs for an invite I got, I got a note from a friend of mine who had gotten access to the site early as well.

He didn’t want me to name him directly in the post, but our conversation was a pretty good snapshot of our first impressions, and I wanted to share it with you.

Here’s a slightly edited version of our conversation (names have been changed to protect identities):

Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins: Heya chief. You’re actually the first person I’ve connected with here. Everyone else has headed off to bed.
John Smith: I did find someone else on here randomly just by typing into the search field. It could be that, as you mention, everyone else is in bed.

Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins: I’m guessing that’s it. I pinged Scoble, I know he’s back up for a while now that he’s gotten his invite. I sent out a few to folks I know, but mine took like three hours to get, so I’m not expecting too much tonight. Still trying to figure out how to do things with the apps here.

John Smith: It says you can install apps? Where? Or is it so new there aren’t any yet?
Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins: there’s only one third party app that I found – by Ribbit. They’re a company I interviewed down in Austin – they do voice API work, so ostensibly it integrates voice conversation into wave. …Where did I find that thing?

Ah yes. The extensions gallery. Should be the last message if you click on "All".

John Smith: Ah, I see it. Been listening to the sort of puzzled reviews of this by developers the last few months. Essentially everyone says they don’t quite get it until they see other people on here. As best I understand it, this is some sort of cross between Wikipedia and Basecamp.
Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins: Yeah. It has the potential to be a killer publishing tool, for those that are concerned with the whole "real-time" business. Liveblogging and such.

John Smith: Yeah… true… I just think that’s a limited audience. How many people edit Wikipedia? However, if it becomes more like chat, then it could be huge / mass-market. Only question is if it will integrate with Gmail (or would it need to)?
Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins: I wouldn’t mind this sort of interface replacing my GMail interface. It’s clean and actually more aesthetically pleasing to me than the oppressive wall of unread junk my GMail has become. I think it has a lot of potential as a sort of Twitter / Activity stream type thing too, just knowing what I know about the architecture of it.

The goal, as I understand it, is that it’s supposed to be not just a web based service, but a server package that you can install for your intranet or what-have-you…

The impression that I have is that this could be a play at FB/Twitter using the Identi.ca architecture as a precursor to their roadmap. I believe that Identi.ca failed to catch on because they have no momentum – but Google wouldn’t have that problem.

John Smith: It seems to go counter to their theory of the cloud in some ways. It’s sort of like Google Apps is to Gmail, and it took a while for those accounts to be fully exploitable by the Google login infrastructure… thinking in terms of interoperability of chat… I wish I could piggyback my Gmail chat into Google Apps.

Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins: Yeah – It is somewhat of a departure in that it can be an installable product. They haven’t done that many times – the only other one I can think of is Picasa.

John Smith: Except this sounds like it has the potential to be more fragmented given it is locally installed on your server.

Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins: Well, they’d all be interoperable .. the fundamental transport protocol they’re using is XMPP (the Jabber protocol, basically, which is federated IM in it’s most common usage). So I guess in effect it’s still all a cloud, just not a centralized cloud like the one Google currently operates.

John Smith: Yeah, that sounds about right. The Achilles heel will be perceived complexity. How many people have failed by being Twitter but with one extra feature added?

Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins: Exactly. That’s going to be the toughest part. There’s tons of buttons on here, and there will only be tons more once developers really start revving up the engines on this. I like it, but I like shiny things with lots of buttons, and am generally not mainstream.

John Smith: It’s good. Definitely solves the clumsiness of email. (Though in some ways chat already did that. You can’t do a lot with chat, like enterprise-level stuff, that it sounds like you could do here. Question is if it becomes a super-useful collaboration tool for a select group (like Google Apps and Basecamp), or whether it is a big play in the real-time web (Twitter).

Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins: I think it may be a bit of both. Back when I was talking to a "mole" I had in Google (back during when the gPhone story was breaking), he was talking about the all-hands meeting Google had to basically come up with a response to Facebook, which was killing them in the PR / tech blogosphere at the time…

.. basically, the idea they came up with was to use GMail as the basis for people’s social graphs, since it’s the "original social network," instead of stupid Me-too ideas like Orkut.

Combining that idea with the trends in real time web stuff, this seems like a love child of what’s current and that original idea.

John Smith: Is it me or has Facebook.com become completely useless? Facebook Connect, on the other hand, is extremely powerful, but I am not sure how they monetize that piece. I just think the main property has become polluted. They masterfully executed the third party app rollout and then proceeded to strangle it.

Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins: I’ve never been real big on Facebook, personally. I got into it when Scoble and Ken Rutkowsi were evangelizing the heck out of it, and by the time I got on their radars (a few months later) it was sorta devoid of value for me.

John Smith: It is good as a platform for identity on the web, but not much else. The stuff in my stream is completely worthless, mostly because I have a bunch of people in there I don’t know, but even those I do, it’s too fragmented to make sense. With Twitter I don’t have to process posts differently based on whether they’re a photo / video / etc. etc. It is incredibly messy, notwithstanding their efforts to copycat.

Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins: Yeah… I have the same problem. Twitter is nice because you can come at it from dozens of different angles… if I need news, I go to an aggregator like Twazzup or something… if I want conversation, I sit on the timeline and talk to people… and if I happen to see an update pop up that’s slightly interesting, I click on it. Facebook, you have the problem I always had with Friendfeed, which is that it’s useless unless your obsessive about categorizing your friends into niches or groups.

If I go to my Austin category or my Pundits category (or even my HS category) on Facebook, it’s slightly cogent in terms of it not being just junk puked on my screen. But that’s such a hassle to click through.

John Smith: I never use Friendfeed, and I do categorize on Facebook so as to maintain a directory of all the people I know. But the actual content is worthless. Stuff like HuffPo’s implementation of it and the idea of having an instant social network on your site based on existing connections that in some ways goes deeper than your Gmail social graph because you don’t email your high school friends, is great. But it’s not the central feature. The thing that could be really cool about this is the embeddability onto a site, and the ability to do different sorts of video chat (as an example). For instance, if you could essentially host a videoconference from your site. The versatility may save it from feature creep in that way, if the users have a chance to dictate how it’s used. (Side Note: Digging how you can edit past posts for clarity).

It was at that point that John and I signed off for the evening, our conversation devolving into yawns and goodbye pleasantries. I did include most of our conversation here because I think it’s a pretty decent indicator of our first impressions of Wave.

As the userbase grows, or if an instance were to be installed to service a company or operations group, I think it could be quite a bit more useful and interesting (and how that interesting-ness level evolves will be largely dependent on what sort of gadgets and robots are developed for it down the line).

Initially, though, I give it a couple of thumbs way up.  Google Wave was definitely worth the wait.