Almost everyone in Oursky got the Google Wave invitation last week so we’re ready to do some real test on how well it works within team collaboration.

Instead of using a combination of emails, IRC, Trac (Wiki) and DropBox for collaboration, we tried to use Google Wave for a few days last week for:

• A chat room for general collaboration
• Team cooperation on the iPhone Application Development
• Brainstorm room for use cases of our new WorkFlow project

Here are a initial summary of thought:

• The major problem now is the performance and stability of the software, it is known as Wave is still in preview, not even in beta!
• It is not easy to track the unread conversation now, some UI things should be improved on this one.
• When you reply the last message, the reply doesn’t indent, it is kind of very wried and consider as a “bug” by most people as I know.
• Why real time typing? It might be useful for real-time collaboration on documents but it is a very serious distraction and affect productivity since it tends to attract your eye-balls

Despite the many un-statisfication on the stabilities and performance, Google Wave, frankly looks most promising to us on it’s extensibility compare with other communication tools (like email). For example what if we integrate our version control system and ticketing system in Google Wave so that we can discuss the features and do code review on it? My guess is the success of Google Wave largely depends on how easy for developers to extend so that people can start doing more and more useful communication on Wave.