This weekend I was officially invited accepted to join the Google Wave. While I was feeling fairly happy with myself I was wondering what to do with the 8 invites I got as well. Luckily for me others I know also got the invite at the same time (guess they lowered the requirements 
). Ok for those hiding in a cave or haven’t heard about the buzz, here is what Wave is meant to be:
“Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”
This is the email that hit my in box across the weekend.
After playing with the software me its like a communal no holds barred whiteboard – but with history tracking. However this whiteboard is written text, graphics, videos etc. People can read or help contribute/refine the whiteboard – which is known in Google terms as a “Wave”. People can be invited late into the Wave, and quickly catchup (or back track depending on your perspective) using the history tracking feature. A friend described is as “cross between a wiki/twitter/blog/im/email.” Its certainly an interesting concept and I can actually see it working well in a number of cases.
Playing with it is certainly revealing and you can quickly see the high level implications of it, but you definitely need either a small group of folks needing to solve a “problem” (be it a BBQ cook out that needs organizing, or a technical design) to really benefit from this collaboration tool (at this time), or you need more adoption to get people to use it more.
Frankly this is pretty exciting – I just need to get a reason/project to use it in more anger now
More information can be found at this [About Google Wave], and the key to its success will be its “Add-in” extensions and the underlying API. I believe the most valuable parts of this whole thing is the API backbone used to power “Wave”, and how far browsers can be pushed to support these very dynamic collaborative applications.
The standard warning however is, this is not production, nor it is even “Beta”, this is “Preview”! So dont put all your eggs in the basket without a backup/backout plan!
Gareth
