I’ve used Google Wave sparsely over the past two weeks and recently found one part of the experience noteworthy in it’s difference from current email conventions. Because it is “live” or instantaneous, when you are participating in a thread other folks can see what you are typing as you type it. A cool feature until you want to compose a message and don’t get it right the first time. For example, being the deliberate fellow I am, I sometimes rewrite a sentence or paragraph before sending an email. That process is now transparent (if the other thread participants are signed into Wave). So I find myself checking first to see if the participants are signed in. If not, I have the freedom of editing my work. If they are logged in I treat it more like instant messaging. I haven’t used Wave long enough or with a wide enough range of people to really get a feel for it, but I was struck by this new paradigm.
