Yesterday at 4AM, my phone chirped at me. I had been awakened by an email from the fine folks at Google, with an invitation to try out Google Wave. I promptly dressed, put on my Google hat, re-hung my GMail banner on the wall (I had taken it down the day they had a two-hour outage), decorated a Wave cake, lit a candle, cracked my knuckles, and spent the next 30 hours playing with every feature.

Wave isn’t just a piece of software, but a protocol Google invented to replace email. Well, that’s kind of true – they sought to do a lot of things beyond email, like collaborative editing, chat and enhanced spam control. It’s “open”, so you could theoretically expect Microsoft to build support for it into Outlook if Wave takes off. The interface isn’t anywhere near finished, but I figured I might offer a few marginally-applicable opinions on some fundamental issues that are going to hurt its adoption among the Internet-Explorer-using populace.

The interface, which, by the way, doesn’t load in Internet Explorer, looks cool with nifty use of drop shadows and the trademark Google blue (is it actually trademarked yet?). You can minimize, but not drag-n-drop, windows to essentially fill up any space except for the logo, which makes it akin to a pesky T-shirt tag that always gets in the way. When you click on a Wave, it loads on the right side of the screen, but if you have two Waves open, it will overwrite one of them with the one you clicked. There’s also no way to go back or re-open the one you were just viewing without finding it again. Most of the buttons are repeated between the Inbox and Wave’s toolbars, adding to the general clutter you would expect in Lotus Notes (brutal, I know, but someone was going to say it). ‘Tags’ on each Wave are collaborative, so there’s no way to stop your work buddy from reorganizing your Waves and breaking your saved searches. You’re allowed to file messages into personal folders, but you can’t put a message into multiple folders, like you can in GMail with its use of labels.

Maybe they’re working on some of those UI snags. I’ll bet they have a whole list of features they need to add before going into alpha testing (beta = “shipping product” at Google). But the real issue I see here is with notifications. With email, this is straightforward: someone types a message, hits ‘send’, it arrives in your inbox, and you’re alerted with a pop-up and a pronounced chirp. With Wave, everything is in constant flux – anything can be changed at any time by any of the participants, no matter how old the Wave or insignificant the change. If you were notified on every change, your computer would be attracting all sorts of randy fowl because every keypress is added to the Wave in real-time. That’s right: other people are watching the characters you type, as you type them. Notifications are useful for staying on top of pertinent notes, but with Wave you pretty much have to keep an eye on your inbox all day to stay on top of every minor edit that happens.

Let’s pretend you’re a manager of a 20-person department, and they add you as a participant to all of their communications. The messages become bold and float to the top of your inbox whenever someone is doing their work. You’re then expected to stay on top of every comma, every ampersand your employees enter, since there is no way to differentiate between high- and low-priority changes. Eventually, it will be like sitting in the front row of Transformers 2 in IMAX 3D while listening to Rammstein. Talk about ADD-inducing. By the way, who wants cake?