Last night I had beta-testing session with some fellow Google Buzzers of Wavelook. It’s a Microsoft Outlook plugin that bring the power of Google Wave to the inbox, something Google has yet to do in a meaningful way. Side note: I have been told via unofficial Google channels that my Holy Trinity (a Wave, Buzz and Gmail nexus) is in the works. In the meanwhile, the expandability of the API’s have given enterprising developers the ability to build a better Wave interface.
Wavelook is pretty easy to installed and while I hate Outlook I felt it was duty to endure for the sake of beta-testing. I was accompanied by @Tom Awtry and @Alfredo Abambres in this experiment and I have to say it was pretty phenomenal. Once installed simply add a Wave account as an inbox or as part of a unified inbox. Wavelook has the all to familiar Outlook look and fell. I found it actually not as easy to use at first as Wave (which is a testament to the learning curve) and waves with lots of blips looked just as messy and confusing as they do in the Google Wave client.
However, as new waves came in or as waves got updated I could see them go bold in the inbox. It felt very comfortable like how email should be. When at work, I get emails from people all the time and occasionally I would like to strike up a chat session. That use case became very apparent as I messed around with this. With the waves themselves I can see real-time typing as I interacted with all the participants. I could even see attachments other wave participants post, although I could not attach any files from Outlook. I have been promised by Wavelook’s developers themselves that the feature is coming soon.  And developer relations is top notch with someone named Matt promising to be at our beck and call if we have any issues.
Now for those of you that still hate wave this may not be a big deal, but for the rest of us wave fanatics this may start moving the use of wave to the main stream. There are still people that use desktop email clients (I know those people are weird). Lots of corporate ITÂ enterprises use Outlook religiously. If wave federation starts becoming a reality this might be the familiar front end that boosts wave adoption, possibly in the enterprise. Or maybe I just a dreamer? Either way this blast from the past has me bullish again on wave.