If the standing-room only attendance at Tuesday’s Create World session on Google Wave is anything to go by, there are people out there by the truckload champing at the bit to get their hands on Google Wave. Still in beta form, and still available by invitation only (you can ask to be invited, but it might take a while to get a response), the hype about Wave is that it represents the next quantum leap forward in respect of online collaboration and information management. See for example the developer preview from Google:
But does it live up to the hype? And how difficult is it to use? And will it be sufficiently sexy and robust to drag our technophobic colleagues away from their insistence that collaboration is best handled by email, with all its detritus of archive boxes, and attachment folders full of multiple versions of misnamed, unordered files?
These are questions that Andrew Dekker, Stephen Viller and Aaron Tan (University of Queensland) have been investigating. In that process they have developed a particular Mac implementation of the system which they call CocoaWave, and which you can download and play with yourself (if you’re game!) …. Andrew & Stephen talk about it in this interview with Ian Green.
Allan Carrington is a Learning Designer with the Centre of Learning and Professional Development at the University of Adelaide. 
Dr Ian Green teaches and researches in areas of researcher education, elearning and linguistics at the University of Adelaide. 
Prof Kate Foy is a freelance creative arts consultant and practitioner, and an e-learning researcher. Formerly Assoc Prof and USQ Faculty of Arts Deputy Dean, Kate continues her University affiliation with USQ as an Honorary Professor.
First reaction on diving into Wave was a great, confused ‘What the …!’ Not enough people there to collaborate with, although this has changed in the past 6 or so weeks since I’ve been splashing around. As is the case with all social networking apps, you need people to socialise with, and the success or otherwise of your engagement is in direct proportion to the number of others in your ’stream’ ‘pool’ … whatever.
Now that there are a goodly number to experiment with, I’m finding Wave to be more useful than at first I’d expected, though as yet it’s in pre-beta, many of the options are still closed, and the issue of notification when a new ‘blip’ is made (that’s a new entry in a Wave)still requuires a third party app like Waveboard, which I’m using. You get a Growl-like notification that there is new material waiting for you.
Would I switch to Wave from Google Docs, a shared Posterous, Skype etc., for contact and collaboration? Not yet … early days still, but I look forward to the bedding down period when we can all surf far more confidently.
I think the CocoaWave tool is accessed here: – I’m not convinced the link provided in the main blog entry is the same team.
Finding people to connect with via the Wave is still the biggest hurdle for engagement at the moment.
I’m surfing the wave as kimboaus AT googlewave.com – happy to receive recommendations for useful bots and gadgets.