As I said yesterday, the current Google Wave preview has its flaws. It’s unpolished and light on some critical editing tools.

It’s also missing the single most important element in any collaborative project — other people. Until Wave sees wide adoption, it can be difficult to recognize the protocol’s full potential.

Still, all you need for your own collaborative writing project is one other person. Once you’re in the preview, Google sends you new invitations pretty quickly and I was able, within a couple weeks, to get everyone I ever talk to online enrolled in the program.

Only three or four of them still participate regularly, but I spend a lot of time working projects with those three or four people in Google Wave every week. As long as you can get a collaborator to peek in from time to time, you can do amazing things with it.

I talked a little bit about prewriting yesterday, and I’ve got half a dozen writing projects in various stages of design sitting in my Wave inbox even as we speak. I’ve used Wave for a lot more than that, though. I’ve used it to discuss book ideas and get feedback on drafts, to prepare development plans for major programming projects, to make dinner plans with a large group of friends, and to discuss the merits of certain humorous webcomics.

Whatever your purpose, getting the most out of Google Wave (without getting frustrated) can take a little bit of care.

Putting Wave through Its Paces

A wave, as I mentioned yesterday, is a series of comments or “blips” strung together in nested hierarchies.

One of the first things you should do in Wave is have a good complicated chat with a friend. Make sure to go back and start new offshoot conversations off early comments from time to time, and get an idea how nested waves grow (and how to read through them without getting lost).

Edit your blips, too. For us grammar snobs, it’s probably the single greatest advantage of Wave over chat clients (and even email). Did you post without reviewing your comment? Did you make a typo or a copy/paste error? No problem. Publish and polish, as Dave would say. Feel free to fix your errors (and even your collaborators’ errors) at your own leisure.

One of the biggest weaknesses of the current preview is that you can’t yet rearrange blips. It’s aggravating, for a tool that so excels at managing and organizing conversations. But if the people you’re working with don’t pay attention to their nesting, or plan ahead, it’s easy to end up with conversations in the wrong places.

I’m sure that, in time, that’ll be fixed. For now, I just try to plan ahead and design my waves, building a string of consecutive top-level blips before I invite others into the conversation (just like I mentioned yesterday in an example), so that I can be sure any discussion of those topics will naturally occur beneath their entries.

Surviving Its Shortcomings

At this point I’ve repeated “preview” a bunch of times, but I haven’t really explained it. Maybe it seems obvious enough, to anyone who remembers the Beta tag that hung on GMail for four or five years, but it’s a little more complicated than that.

See…Google Wave isn’t a website, or an authoring program. Google Wave is a communication protocol. It’s a standardized, open-source method for capturing, tagging, and distributing snippets of conversations.

The Google Wave preview, though, is a website and an authoring program. It’s a sample of what can be done with the Wave communication protocol. In this case, Google put together a multi-purpose communication client that’s designed to look and function a lot like a chat client with an email-style Inbox.

You can try writing a novel in it (as I have), and you’ll get frustrated and switch back to Google Docs quick enough (as I did). That doesn’t mean Wave is no good for novelists, though — it means novelists need a custom Wave client designed to handle large blips, to differentiate between authors and reviewers, and to hide one reviewer’s feedback from others (so they can experience the text just as it is).

And all of that will come, if the protocol isn’t entirely rejected and forgotten by the community. In the meantime, we make up for it with some of the tricks I described above — designing the discussion, dividing subtopics into individual blips — or, even better, individual waves that can easily be dragged into a master wave to create links.

That’s how I often end up organizing the discussion of a major project. I start a new wave to serve as the Table of Contents and contain general discussion of the project as a whole, then I make new waves for different aspects of the project (To Do list, visual design, organization and structure, purposes/goals, that sort of thing), and link each of them into the first one.

You can also make up custom tags to assign your waves, much like you would for blog posts, and use them in the same way, too. You can use Wave’s search function to display a list of all waves matching a given tag, and even save that search for future use (so it functions kind of like a folder in your email client).

With a little care and handling, it’s easy enough to make this preview feel just like the real deal.

Entering Its Gates

Of course, there’s still the matter of getting in. The preview is currently invite-only, and it probably will be for a while.

I know that sounds pretty exclusive (and maybe a bit intimidating), but it’s really not. As I said before, within a few weeks of joining, I had more than enough invitations to bring in everyone I knew. For that matter, I’ve still got extras. I haven’t used any of them in months.

So if you’re convinced, if you’d like an invite, let me know in the comments. Even if I use mine up, I’ve got friends and family who would all be happy to share some of theirs, too. If it gets you working in Wave, it’ll be well worth it.