I’ve been fortunate enough to get a Google Wave invite and I just signed up yesterday. Now what? I think I a lot of early adopters are asking themselves this question. The concept of Google Wave is intriguing and I think we make up wild ideas of how we’d use the service but then we’re at a loss once we get it. What exactly will I use this for? Who will I use this with? What makes this any better than a threaded Gmail conversation or a collaborative Google Doc? I don’t have answers to those questions yet.

What sort of situation can I see using Wave? Well, maybe to setup some travel plans with a friend so that we can keep all our wishes and wants together. Or, maybe to plan a party with a group of people where all the details will be visible, etc. I’m not 100% sure how I could use it in my personal life.

What about my professional life? While sitting at work today I have come up with a few examples where having Google Wave in the enterprise environment would be great. For me, I am always opening tickets to get implementations completed or fixes in place for previous implementations. It would be great if the entire history of an implementation was available to anyone who wanted to view it. Right now, I have to search through thousands of tickets and hope I can find the one that has the specific request for the change I’m researching. To have this all in one collaborative location would be great. Another way I can see it benefiting my work would be in our billing guidelines that we have to create for every customer. It would be so great to have the history of how the requirements have changed for a customer over the months and years. When someone leaves the company, they wouldn’t take the billing knowledge with them. Do I think I’ll ever see something like this where I work? No, not unless such technology can be housed inside of the corporate firewall. These days, companies are too paranoid about information to allow such collaboration to take place outside of their firewalls. In the mean time, I can dream… can’t I?

Question: Do you have Google Wave? If so, what do you use it for?