I've been playing around with the Google Wave preview and thinking about how it might change the way international NGOs communicate, both internally and externally. What follows are some very early thoughts -- written in Wave, naturally.

First thing to know is that it is not a final product yet. One person I was waving with called it, "no where near a beta version", and that seems fair. It's very early days. A lot of bits and pieces don't work, and you have to use your imagination to understand the potential it offers.

Second, it is a bit confusing because, while you can see how useful it will be as a communications tool, it doesn't work exactly like anything else you're accustomed to. I find myself expecting it to work in certain ways and then trying to force it into those standard ways. Sure, it can work as you would use email or IM, but so many features differentiate it from that. The ability to have multiple simultaneous remote editors on one text is frustratingly non-linear if you expect a clear back-and-forth of email or IM, but if you take it for what it is, it's amazing.

I can imagine using that aspect in particular when drafting short texts and letters more quickly with several authors all around the world. It will take a while getting used to, surely.

And taking that possibility together with integration into blogs, websites, Twitter, Facebook, email and IM will deliver some excellent opportunities for collaborative creation and publication in all sorts of formats. I can see where field staff and comms staff in an international NGO will find this really useful. I'm already using all these means to communicate and joint-edit texts with colleagues and journalists in all sorts of places, but to have this integrated into one product so everyone can work on something at the same time and then publish/send quickly to a variety of formats/outlets would streamline everything.

Current bugs in Wave are still frustrating. I've posted some Tweets via Wave already, but I can't get the Bloggy app to work to update blogs from within Wave. (Admittedly, it could be I just haven't figured it out yet!)

But I am imagining Wave eventually being a super Google Documents plus IM plus email all in a comms-output-control dashboard like Tweetdeck. If we get there, I think it will revolutionise internal and external communications for a lot of organisations working from multiple locations.