* A lot of things still don’t work well, or at least not intuitively. It’s early beta, fair enough, and it’s not like they didn’t warn us. But I am a little surprised at how much they’ve let go. For example, it’s tough to delete waves, or leave public waves. I don’t mean the process is physically demanding; you just drag the object to the trash, but it doesn’t always work.

* For a web app, it’s incredibly CPU intensive. As I type this on my netbook (Asus EEE PC 1005HAB – 1.6 GHz Intel Atom running Windows 7 w/ 2GB RAM) with one Chrome window open, my CPU usage is fluctuating between 5% and 20%. Let’s open a Wave and see what happens…

Ok, CPU utilization jumps to between 60% and 80%, and that’s just opening a wave — not having a threaded conversation. Why so much? Because Wave depends heavily on Gears, so your machine is doing more of the heavy lifting than it usually does for web apps, where most of the processing takes place on the server side. This also matters because Gears performance is not the same in all browsers. Since Chrome is optimized for Gears, then one could say that Wave is optimized for Chrome.

* Conversations in Google Wave take some getting used to, and have a lot more to do with personal preferences.  IM is real-time, and email is turn-based, (for all you strategy game nerds out there), but Wave is somewhere in-between. So I’ve chatted with one person who started a new “blip” with each response. On another chat with a different person, we kept our own blips running, so it was a chat in two separate windows.

Ok, I’m over my word limit, so I’m cutting off here. Lots more thoughts to follow.

Oh, and I still have one invite left.

In short, Google VVave extends GMail’s concept of email as a threaded conversation rather than a string of discrete documents. VVave makes every email a collaborative conversation, that blends

• traditional asynchronous discussion (I send you an e-mail, you read it whenever and respond at your convenience)
• real-time chat (we’re both on line, and we talk back and forth, within our email thread)
• social media (where we can embed images, videos, links, etc.)

It feels kinda like Facebook for introverts, where you might want to have a multi-media, multi-threaded conversation that evolves over time with one or a small group of users, but not leave it open to all 138 of your friends (or more, if you’re less of an introvert).

If you want the specifics of what it does and how it does it, I recommend watching the videos Google’s posted. They are fun and watchable and neither technical nor dumbed down.

I just have one problem with Google VVave, and that’s how stingy they’ve been with invites. I got my invite in the second round, and I’ve since “nominated” a few other people, none of whom have received their invites yet.

I understand that it’s beta, I understand that the kinks haven’t been worked out, and it was fun to be one of the first people I knew with a GMail account. But I could email anyone with my GMail account, not just other GMail users. I now have a ingenious collaborative tool, and no collaborators. Huh?

So yeah, Google VVave is brilliant, just not so’s you’d notice.

PS — If any readers already have VVave accounts, let me know. I’m dying to try it.