Greetings and salutations my fellow Oklahomans. I am not sure whether you saw this or not, but I received my Google Wave Beta invitation the other day. One of the things sitting in your inbox when your first sign in is 8 additional invites for your friends and closest suck ups. The first order of business – to see who wanted one bad enough and why. Hence the blog posting over at http://patrickallmond.com/2009/10/12/who-wants-a-google-wave-invite-and-why/ . It was a hard list to choose from but I managed to find 7 people who were deserving to share these with. Why only 7 you may ask – Google gives you 8 invites to share with friends. Well Patrick in his excitement pasted an email address of one his friends but left off the first character. Oh well – no takesy backseys.

After working with it for for about two days here are the things that really come to mind:

1. We need to get some more people on here for this to be useful. While I can appreciate the trickle out process that Google is following the only people on here are people that are playing around like me. For this to be useful I need to get clients and my parents on here. I’d love to use this to collaborate on some of the PR and software development projects I am working on right now. I’d easily use this over email as a collaboration tool to see how must faster we could move. But the only other people on here right now are geeky early adopters like me. While I love people just like me, I’d rather share real time information with the people that are paying me to dance. Get on it Google.

2. If this is the future of web applications man I want to be a part of it. I pride myself on being fairly web-centric. All of my contacts and emails are web and server based. My house could burn down and I would not miss a beat when it came to contacts. Same thing goes with phone. Steal my phone – I don’t care – got it all online. But there has always been something warm and fuzzy about using software installed locally on my Windows machine. One of the main features – locally install applications are always faster that web-based ones. However all of that is changing with applications like Google Wave. This application feels like it is here in my house, not far away along the West coast. Other companies that produce locally installed applications need to pay attention to the look and feel and the standards that Google is going by. If you were to make a version of Quicken or Microsoft Word that worked like this you’d have me on those in a heartbeat. Love it Google.

3. Google Wave allows you to go back and comment on a earlier part of a conversation – and I absolutely cannot stand that. You could say that I have become accustomed to the way email works. Or you could just say that we as humans don’t jump back and forth in time when we speak. Either way – it does not work for me. In real life if you want to go back and comment on a previous comment of mine – well then that is a new conversation. Google Wave does have the option to create new Wave from an existing conversation. I can see using that more than splitting my conversation in two based on something someone said two days ago. No thanks Google.

4. If implemented correctly this might be the beginning of the end of spam. People have been adding me to waves based on getting my ID. Google needs to give me the chance to approve/deny being added to a contact list and/or wave. Once that is in place and this way of communicating becomes the norm (if it does) then I will only be seeing what I want to see from people that I want to see it from. Fix that Google.

Overall this is a very cool toy. I am sure that it will be in Beta for the next five years – that is how Google rolls. We also have to keep one more thing in mind – what everybody is calling “Google Wave” is just a simple implementation of the API. Google Wave is a framework for all of us to build applications on top of. I am very excited to see what other applications will appear that use Google Wave as the back end. If you are a developer hop on over to the Google Wave API site and create something awesome.

My primary IT consulting company Focus Consulting, Inc. has been trying to get on the GSA schedule 70 for some time now. For those you that have ever tried you know it is not quickest nor the easiest process. What I have learned is that the smart businessman (that has a little extra cash) goes the route of finding a company to do it for him. The benefits are many, but the main point is that these people do this full time. They have filled out the forms, they have talked to the contracting officers ; they know their stuff. I’ve been trying for the past 8 months to work with a company (unnamed) to get this done and have not been getting very far. I thought I was getting a bargain at $6000 ($2000 up front, $4000 after I am on schedule) but so far my money has not gotten me too far. Time to abandon this ship and find another one.
I did some googling last night to find another company to help me get started on the process. One of the many companies that I researched last night was GSA Proposal. After I did some reading on their site I decided to take the plunge and fill out their information sheet to get the ball rolling. I really need to get on the GSA schedule. My company already has a government contract and both sides (Focus and the Contractee) are trying to expand the scope and the number of resources that we are using. Being on the GSA schedule would help us greatly.

So far I am very impressed with this company. I have talked on the phone with Jamey Zell who runs the marketing side of things. He was very pleasant to speak to, and right off the bat I felt very confident of this companys abilities and of the man I was speaking to. He explained the process that his company uses to get the ball rolling, and was able to answer the few questions I had. Since we had such a great fit I decided to proceed and have a welcome packet emailed to me.

A couple of hours later I received my welcome email, a signed NDA, and my invoice for 1/2 of the services. I signed what I needed to and paid what I needed to ASAP to get the ball back in their court.

Only time will tell how good these guys are but we are off to a great start. Come back and visit often and I will post the progress we are making. Feel free to post any questions you have below.