The Google Wave preview has been out for a little while now and a few of our employees have been testing it out. We talked to Danny Johnson of the Sales and Marketing team to see his initial thoughts about Google Wave.

Q: I know a lot of people covet invites to the Google Wave preview, how did you get on to Wave?

Danny Johnson getting ready to ride a wave

A: I applied to get a Wave invite from Google but I wasn’t on their initial list of guests; however, I knew that everyone that got invited received a limited number of invites to give to others so I did the logical thing and got on Twitter looking for one.  I did a search and found a Twitter user named @madmikeuk who was offering invites. I sent him a quick tweet and he in turn, invited me to wave.

Q: What were your initial thoughts when you started waving?

A: At first I didn’t know anyone else on Wave so I searched “with:public” for public waves and saw a wave for people from Utah and one for lawyers, so I joined those. My first thoughts were that it was pretty slow, and I guess a lot of people have noticed that and Google has said that this will not be an issue when beta comes out. Other than that, it is great! One specific way I think Wave will be used is at conferences and trade shows. Right now at trade conferences people are live tweeting at the shows but I think Wave will be a better platform for that. If I were a conference organizer, I would create various Waves for attendees to join to discuss events and broadcast notes from sessions. For example, Salesforce.com is holding their Dreamforce conference this week and there already is a wave for broadcasting the keynote session. Also, for those that were at ILTA this year, we ran a contest on Twitter which went really well. Keep this on the down low, but maybe next year we’ll do a contest using Google Wave.

Q: What else have you done on Google Wave?

A: I’ve done a little file sharing and tried to do some collaboration work but not a lot. I’ve used some of the gadgets though. For example, I started a Wave about the Utah Jazz and posted a Yes/No/Maybe gadget that comes standard for every wave user and asked if the Jazz would win their division. I added a few of my contacts and made the wave public. After about a week I checked back and a number of fellow Jazz fans had joined in on the discussion. Most of the comments however, were frustrated rants as the Jazz are struggling right now.

Q: Thanks for your time Danny.

A: No problem. If anyone reading this wants to wave with me, my Wave address is dannymjohnson@googlewave.com.

After talking to Danny, we asked Leonard Johnson, our VP of Marketing about his thoughts on how Wave will interact with NetDocuments.

Leonard: We announced in August our intention to integrate NetDocuments document management and collaboration service with Google Wave.  The majority of our customers are professional service firms, including law, accounting and financial advisors. The common thread is servicing their clients. There is a growing trend towards client portals in these industries to increase the value of their services and to have a “place” on the Web where their clients can go to interact, converse, share content, deliver information and in essence, increase client loyalty. We see Wave as a complimentary extension to NetDocuments–the home or repository to the intellectual assets of our customers–with collaborative features and also ease of use in collaborating through the social media reach of Google.  We share the vision of going beyond email.

Happy Waving!