I have been playing around with google wave for a few months now. I was rather impressed when I first saw the “loooong video” presenting google wave to the public. I tried to get my hands on an invitation and played around with it for a while. I have to say it constitutes as an amazing piece of technology. The possibilities seem endless and using google wave to work on some kind of document seems really tempting. However using wave for code at work or business documents does not seem to be compatible with my contract especially considering the included non-disclosure agreement.

The second approach was to motivate my colleagues to try wave and use it for private stuff such as the occasional after work gathering or the recent climbing excursion. Again, wave offered great features. I embedded a map displaying the route from the company to the location and some basic information about the climbing center including a link to the homepage. This is nothing fancy and mails would have done the same job. By the time we got the third of the 4 people participating in at our trip to join google wave, we had long sat down together in the office, discussed a date and driving arrangements and fixed everything else. As far as the beautifully embedded google map goes, I was asked for directions to the climbing center on the afternoon of our trip and I think the climbing centers homepage was used to get the directions at the last minute and on second thought I would have done the exact same thing.

If organizing free time is not among the things I’m going to use wave for. What is left? I was told of a few public waves discussing all sort of thing. In theory I just have to find and join them. I tried and failed. However I found the wave analogy quite suitable. I got the feeling I was sorting through all the random noises produced around the world in a way that was not meant to handle this usecase. I think the analogy would be analyzing static.

So for me I have to say google wave is an incredible piece of technology but I can’t seem to find usecases that are not handled in a better way by different tools.

The site offering the most TV series (in Germany) seems to be lovefilm. I went for a two week trial of the one DVD flatrate and so far it’s extremely comforable. However there is a little downside. The round trip time for DVDs seems to be at least 4 days because the shipping center is somewhere in the far north of Germany. This is a little more than I expected especially given that they don’t ship on weekends which more or less makes it one DVD per week. This is actually fine for feature movies but too slow if it comes to TV series and definitely not what I had in mind when I read “flatrate”.

To be fair the German post service issued a press release stating that letters might take a little longer durring summer holidays, but given the location of the shipping center I don’t think it’s going to get much faster, so I’ll just have to see. Maybe taking the 2 DVDs flatrate option is a viable way to go because then I can at least have one here at all times.

Round trip time aside this is a great service and I will definitely keep using it.