I have recently been “chosen” to receive a fistful of invitations to Google‘s newest permanent beta product Google Wave.

This new application is bundled along with an 81 minute video that explains what it is and what it does. My first impression upon noticing that little fact suggested that anything that requires almost an hour and a half to explain is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it likely to interest the casual user. I have spent some time futzing around with Google Wave and believe that I am, indeed, ready to share my initial impressions.

First, I will save you 81 minutes of your life and give you my less than 200 word description of Google Wave. Google Wave is an on-line collaboration application that allows you to collect all information from all sources associated with the topic under discussion in one place. That includes search results, text files, media files, drawings, voicemail, maps, email, reports…everything you can implement, store or view on a computer. Additionally, Google Wave allows you to include and exclude people from the collaboration as the discussion progresses and evolves. And in the usual Google manner, a developer’s API is provided so that interested companies or individuals can contribute functionality or customize installations to suit their needs.

Additionally, (and perhaps cynically) Google Wave serves as a platform for Google to vacuum up and analyze more information about you and your peers and collaborators to be able to serve you more accurately targeted advertisements – which, after all, is what Google’s primary business is all about.

All right…so what about it? Was using Google Wave a transformative experience? Has it turned collaboration on its head? Will this be the platform to transform the global workforce into a seamless, well-oiled machine functioning at high efficiency regardless of geographical location?

My sense is that Google Wave is good but not great. The crushing weight of its complexity means that the casual user (i.e., most people) will never be able to (or, more precisely, never want to) experience the full capabilities of Google Wave. Like Microsoft Word, you will end up with 80% of the users using 20% of the functionality with this huge reservoir of provided functionality never being touched. In fact, in a completely non-scientific series of discussions with end-users, most perceive Google Wave to be no more than yet another email tool (albeit a complex one) and therefore really completely without benefit to them.

My personal experience is that it is a cool collaboration environment and I appreciate its flexibility although I have not yet attempted to develop any custom applications for it. I do like the idea of collecting all discussion-associated data in one place and being able to include appropriate people in the thread and having everything they need to come up-to-speed within easy reach. Personally, I still need to talk to people and see them face-to-face but I appreciate the repository/notebook/library/archive functionality afforded by Google Wave.

I still have a few invitations left so if you want to experience the wave yourself and be your own judge, post a comment with your email address and I’ll shoot an invite out to you.

I have decided to use this blog to out-gas on things I am thinking about. Aren’t you happy about that?

I have spent some time looking around the popular virtual world platform Second Life. In a virtual world, you assign yourself an avatar (basically a cartoon character representing you) and walk around this large simulated space and interact with other avatars and objects. There is a fun and coolness factor to it all. There are museums to explore, historical location recreations, science fiction universes and dance floors. Lots of dance floors. But what really intrigues me is the very presence in Second Life of large Fortune 500 companies like IBM and Cisco. What are they up to there?

I spoke to some people experiencing and supporting those companies’ Second Life presence in impromptu discussions “in world” (as they say). The conversations often left me with more questions than answers.  While the Second Life experience promises a high degree of interaction, it comes at a significant cost.  A user needs to become conversant in the use of the proprietary viewer (a special-purpose browser to connect you with the virtual world), the methods for creation, manipulation and animation of  objects and the utilization of the on-line chat facility or its voice-based interaction mechanism.  The primary question is: given all of these costs and barriers to adoption, what is the benefit of this experience over say, WebEx (which Cisco actually owns) or Telepresence (which Cisco also heavily promotes) or even a standard teleconference?  The common answer was either that Second Life was “cool” or “fun” – just what I experienced.  But is that enough?  Does that constitute “the killer app” for virtual worlds? It’s “cool” and “fun”?

There are also, however, some intangibles. People hiding behind their personal (and anonymous) avatars tend to be a little bolder. They tend to speak more openly and honestly. That can allow for more compelling and fruitful interactions and in collaborative circumstances result in better outcomes and solutions developed. Some studies have even shown that this boldness is transferrable to real life. So maybe, these companies are engaging in a little social cognitive therapy for those legions of techies they employ expecting to elicit better human interaction as a result. And that makes it all worthwhile.