Google Wave : Is it worth the hype ??

A few days ago, I got an invite from Google to try the Google Wave . I had been eagerly waiting for the much hyped web app from Google.

I accepted the invitation and waited for the wave to pour over me. It looked pretty nice, somewhat like a mailbox with a chat window in one corner and minimize/restore buttons on all windows. The contacts window showed four or five persons. It seems like I will have to learn to use it, I thought. Immediately I shot off invites to my friend in next room and we began experimenting. Here is what I learnt.

Whenever you want to contact somebody, you create a wave and you can add as many persons as you want from your contact to the wave. Every person that you added will receive the wave in their inbox. They can unfollow it if they wish or mark it as spam. Now when you or any of the persons on the same wave leave a reply, everyone sees it. The best part, you can edit your comments as well as those of others!! And you need not reply serially (as in chat where your sentences appear one below the other) , you can leave a reply anywhere, in the middle, end or beginning. So how do you know who edited what? Use the playback feature of the wave by which you can see the changes made by everybody frame by frame. And yes you can add Google maps and several such gadgets to your comments (the gadgets are few now but will certainly grow in number).

So, what does it have in store for a normal gmail, facebook user? Not much until all your friends are riding the wave. A good use would be kind of private group discussion. For professionals, it would be a good tool to collaborate on projects in real time. Seems like Google has found a good way to use the docs infrastructure it has already in place.

Are Customers truly the KING?

I beg to differ. Recently, I went to a mobile repair shop. My Sony Erricsson phone is now out of warranty so I skipped the Service Center. However, the person at the repair shop behaved as if we had come there since we had no other option. And top of that, when my phone was repaired, after hours of waiting and then being told to come the next day, I discovered that the speakers of the phone were dead. One another round to the shop!!
What hurt me was the behavior of the shopkeeper. It was as if he was doing a service to us without taking money!!