One of the wisdoms in web application development is "Release early and often."

Google and Twitter have both released software "tests" to select hundreds of thousands of users, both with the idea that there will be problems, but let people try them out, and then improve the software iteratively, based upon real-life user experience.

This is my first blush impression of these previews I've been privileged to explore this week.

Get on my Wave!

I've been trying Google Wave for this past week now. It's been a bit hard, since hardly anybody I know is on Google Wave, and of all the people I invited, only two have received invites so far. (I got 8 "invitations" that turned out actually to be "nominations" once sent. Sorry, Google, but invitations and nominations are different things.) So I've had only limited exposure to what Wave might offer. One on one, it's pretty much a glorified instant messenger.

Then I was tipped to searching for "with:public" ... which brings in results every wave that has been posted for the public. There I found all kinds of waves on all kinds of topics.

Popping into random, seemingly interesting waves reminds me of the early CompuServe days, wandering around chatrooms, communicating with random people. Wave does afford the opportunity to get more in these wave connections than you might in a text-only IRC-style chatroom, but it takes time to engage. Do you have an abundance of time? I don't.

The biggest user experience change in what people might be used to is that you can see other people typing their messages in real time, as they type. You learn quickly can type and who bumbles around, who can do stream-of-consciousness and who is constantly editing every few words.

Shira Abel (whom I met on Wave) likes this real-time aspect:

And while some people would hate seeing what someone is writing while they are typing I’ve actually liked it from the few conversations I’ve had on there. It allows you to see the thought process – how fast or slow someone is typing shows how strongly they feel about something. Whether they take something out before pressing enter shows even more. Seeing the typing while it’s happening is the tone of the message. However, I would recommend that Google make the option to not see the typing for the Robert Scoble’s of the world – but please keep it for me. Living in Israel so far away from many of the people I collaborate with, having that little extra bit of psychological insight is actually very helpful in my opinion.

One of the biggest problems with Wave is getting drowned in wave after wave of threads (or "waves"). You have to create folders to organize them or you'll just get lost.

And call them waves all you want, it's pretty hard to surf them. Linking to other waves involves finding the other wave and drag-and-drop.

Google's help docs are their typical weak, uninformative obviousnesses that don't really illuminate much of anything. Embedding waves outside of the wave system is, so far, an arcane procedure I have not yet discovered yet. I'm still wondering how to install a robot. Maybe I'm not enough of a geek for this preview?

Bonnie Sandy seems to have made more headway:

Extending the functionality…

Apparently there are bots and robots to extend the functionality of Waves… that feature has to be simplified before the release to a wider audience.

Robots (To use robots, add them as a contact, then add the robot-contact to a wave)- that did not always work. Robots add functionality Chatbots Conversion Games Groups Integration Language Polling Search / Aggregation Utilities Wave Management figuring out if they are functioning is a bit confusing.

I NEED To Figure out how to use the Drop.io Robot. I aced the Posterous robot, which post a wave to Posterous , but I have no idea if the others are working, in process or done. So I spent a great deal of time just steering at the screen.

Gadgets directions- To use gadgets, once editing a blip, just click on the green puzzle piece, and enter the url into the bottom text box.

This was simpler not all worked but enough to truly give an appreciation of the scope of wave. Html and Iframes allow for widgets and pages to be added. From that point each wave became a stage on which I could present ANYTHING. Wave will be to designers and multimedia communicators what twitter was to those that write!

I don't know about that last part. As a designer, Wave is very hierarchical and serially threaded — not much of a canvas for visual thinking. But maybe someone will bring that in via extension or robot?

Shira concludes:

[A]t the moment Google Wave has little to no use for me. Other than the “Geek Street Cred” I get for having it, I don’t work with anyone else who is on there. It’s not open for the masses. So yes, I’m on Google Wave and I’ve checked it out a few times. But as my time is scarce, I don’t see myself using it regularly at all. In fact – the first person who invited me on Google Wave hasn’t used it. And that says it all.

If you don't quite get what Google Wave is, here's the developer's preview. It's over an hour long, but if you are sincerely curious, this is something to see.

List me!

Twitter rolled out a new feature to a subset of users: Lists. Here you can define lists and then add people you are following to the lists you create.

If you have the feature enabled on your account, you also see how many lists other people have put you on.

What becomes immediately obvious is that this will become a major recommendation engine — a reputation system. What better way to find interesting people than through the recommendations (or at least categorization) by others?

I've discovered many new people to follow just by surfing around the lists. It's neat to know at least something about what people tweet about — art, music, politics, tech, etc.

We'll see how the list usage starts to happen once everyone gets the feature. I'm sure it will start to become spammy — what easier way to spam people than to add them to a list they cannot block? But this could become a new way for people to find connections.

I'm sure Twitter Lists are going to be great fodder for the "Top X" fetishists who just love the "who's is bigger" competitions.

Rebecca Leaman offers Twitter Lists 101 that covers the basics.

Jade Craven has 8 things you should consider before creating your Twitter lists:

1. People may be offended by not being included on a list.

Some of my friends created lists like ‘awesome friends’ and ‘top bloggers.’ They used these terms as generalist lists but some people took offense at not being included on a list.

This is very similar to the follow/unfollow situations that happened before people started to embrace groups on other clients.

So, what can you do to avoid offending?

• Have a disclaimer on your twitter landing page

• Make your list private

• Organize lists by geographic region – ie, Melbourne bloggers.

Neicole Crepeau sees this as a good move for Twitter, business-wise:

Twitter’s growth rate has recently slowed down. According to Hitwise, its phenomenal growth rate slowed to .17%. In part, this appears to be due to an inability to retain new users (60% leaving in the first month of use, by some reports).

Lists represent an opportunity for Twitter to reignite its growth. Lists can help Twitter grow by providing three important improvements:

* A better UI that makes the stream easier for users to digest.
* A positive first experience for new users, where they immediately see the value of Twitter
* A way to spread the word to more non-users and broadly entice them, through List links on blogs, business sites, and through sharing.

She goes on to elaborate on each point.

In the second of a multipart series of posts on Twitter Lists, Adele McAlear looks at the impact of this feature roll-out on the greater Twitter development community:

In the September 30th blog announcement. Nick Kallen, the project lead on Lists stated on the Twitter blog that there will be a Lists API. “This will allow developers to add support for Lists into your favorite Twitter apps.”

It seems that developers were an afterthought on this Twitter Feature. Normally, developers are notified of major feature roll outs such as this well in advance and are afforded the opportunity to work with the API in before the launch. However, the development community weren’t even informed that Twitter Lists was on the development roadmap until September 30th, likely well after Twitter would have started working on it.

When the feature was released yesterday, the vast majority of developers (but interestingly, not all) didn’t even have access to the Lists API documentation until last night. When users like Robert Scoble started building lists and tweeting about them, the dev community cried foul and a draft of the API documentation was quickly made available, sending developers scrambling to integrate Lists into their offerings throughout the wee hours of last night.

Have you been trying out Google Wave or Twitter Lists? What's been your experience?

[This post also appears on BlogHer.com.]