Here it is – the dev preview of Google Wave. The panes available at the moment include the navigation pane (top left) which currently lets you search and organise waves, contacts (bottom left), search column (second column) and the content pane (on the right). A number of options across the top include your username which seems to include a tick in a green circle, Debug (lots of useful information about what’s going on behind the scenes of Wave), Terms (Wave Terms and Conditions), Privacy (Google Privacy Policy), and Sign Out.

The first thing I wanted to do was to change my thumbnail profile image in Wave – to step out of anonymity It isn’t immediately obvious how to do this. The way to do this was to click on your image in the Contacts pane then click the change image button. This bring up a settings screen extremely similar to Google Mail Settings. Go to the My picture section and click on Select a picture.

 

Once that was done, the first thing was to start my first wave. At the moment I am thinking of Wave as being similar to a public forum post, or perhaps a threaded Twitter discussion.

One of the interesting things was the lack of support for Internet Explorer 8. The recommended browsers are Google Chrome, Firefox or Safari. That said, it seemed to run just about ok in IE8 except for a few formatting issues – though I haven’t explored many of the features yet.

I will be looking a little closer at Google Wave over the next few weeks and months – is it going to be a revolution in the way we communicate or simply a “me too” attempt at muscling in on the social media phenomenon?