So I’ve been using Google Wave on and off for about a month now. I think it’s useful for collaborative work.
I know some a lot of people don’t get it and I think it’s because Google made a bad move by branding it as “how email would be like if it were invented today”. That caused everyone to come in with the expectation that it would be like…well…email. Wave is a whole new beast.
It’s a combination of email, wiki and IM. But be careful because it’s not anyone of those. I find that its use is best when it involves more than one person trying to solve problems.
It is not a tool for catching up with an old friend. It’s not a chatting tool…it gets waay too messy, waay too fast.
It is not a wiki(at least not in its present form) because unlike a wiki, you can’t roll back to a previous version.
I think the sample wave that Google provided is a good one because it shows how Wave can be used constructively.
You start with a problem and list down the sub-problems that need to be solved.
Then the wave participants start throwing out ideas all over the place causing the wave to get really messy. But once a solution is agreed upon, someone simply deletes the entire discussion and just leaves the agreed solution on the wave. This keeps the wave readable, moves the problem-solving effort forward and because of the replay function, anyone who wants to see the thought process can simply do a playback.
Keep repeating for all the sub problems.
As i see it the relationship between a wave’s readability and time goes somewhere along the lines of
I’m trying to organise a party using Wave. It got messy from time to time, what’s really interesting is how this time around, I can increase the guest list and update stuff without having to go through the hassle of informing everyone(Especially those “Who else is going?” questions). I just set the wave be the central point of information dissemination where everyone can edit and update. Sure makes being the organiser a lot easier.
I wish they would send me an email when my wave is updated though. Beats having to keep logging in to check.
Related posts:
u want them to send u an email when u get a new message in wave? isn’t that a duplication of content? why would u want to do that?
firstly, it creates more emails for u to check and read, and then u have to delete / clear those emails, and login to wave to respond to the messages there. if people start chatting on wave, that’s gonna flood ur mailbox. in addition, when (not if. when.) it becomes mainstream at workplaces, imagine the chaos. u get a wave, an email appears in ur mailbox. the wave gets updated, another email. another update, another email.
i will slap the wave developers if they allow this to happen. haha.
that said. i think wave is still a great too for work, for collabs and like u said, updating everyone at one place (with them being able to see that there ARE updates) without having multiple emails being sent back n forth. (which nullifies ur last sentence, doh.)
i can’t wait for wave to really become widespread and for people to stop asking, “uh. ok, so i have a google wave account. what do i do with it?” heh.
If you are using firefox, there is this add-on that will have a small icon sit prettily on your statusbar; telling you when you have new waves/wavelets in your wave. Okay…. that was a mouthful.
Download it at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/14973
Well, i’d want notifications to be sent if there’s a change in a wave I created(or subscribe for notifications) because right now i keep going back in just because I need to check if there’s an update. I think it’s just a matter of how they execute the notifications. Because checking the wave account just to find that there’s no update is a serious waste of effort.
Perhaps it’s better implemented as a bot or something
@Krisandro: eh thanks! that’ll be really useful although i’m mostly on chrome these days… I’m still forced to use FF because of it’s plugins
Wah thanks Kris. I never knew that. But like Ridz, I’m mostly on Chrome now too.
FF gets too clunky after a bit. I like Chrome.