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Google Wave – One Year On

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After Google Wave was released, I really wanted to wait a while until the hype settled down and the non believers had a quick look at it, didn’t get it, and then left. Now, one year after the launch of Google Wave, I’m having another look at Wave because I’m at the Google Wave DevFest is on in Sydney this week.
First impressions are great. The UI is now familiar, and buttons work when you click on them (There are still some strange UI things like the strange little scroll bars). Searches and folders works, contacts works well. All these are a great improvement from first trying Wave at the first Google Dev Day in Aus a few weeks after it was launched. See http://wave.google.com/about.html for a bit of an overview of Wave now.

Other great new features are:

  • Email notifications, so you know when a wave is updated.
  • Templates – Start a wave with some content – great idea, but you can’t build your own templates just yet – hopefully this is coming soon.
  • Remove participant from the wave – removed people get access to everything they had up until they were removed from the wave – excellent!
  • Add participant by Email – reduces the barrier to getting new people onto the wave.
  • The wave now tells you how many unread blips there are in the Wave and it will step you through each of the blips so you can see exactly how the conversation has unfolded – fantastic! It means you can just drop in and out of the Wave and still keep up with what is happening.
  • Private Replies
  • Link to individual Blips
  • Copy to new Wave
  • Mark a Wave as Spam.

The Gadgets and Robots are collectively known as Extensions. The ones that are available now a great, and there is now an extensions gallery to easily discover the new extensions right from within wave. And you can either install the extension or “Try it Now”, which is great. – there are so many that are very useful. Some of the great ones are:

  • MindMaps – MindWave by ConceptDraw or Mindmeister
  • BrainStormer
  • Shopping List – a fully collaborative shopping list – now if only it was mobile (currently you have to print it to take it shopping).
  • Tasky – Task List
  • Diagram Editor – create UML diagrams
  • Ferry – Export Waves to Google Docs or other formats
  • WaveTube – who is watching the YouTube video – great for training – knowing people that are watching, or watching and discussing together.
  • Unawave for Project Management – create a group, create a project, and track tasks and milestones and other deliverables for the project. Realtime status reportsee http://www.unawave.com/
Some other cool things about the API’s:
  • Robots can be anywhere now. They don’t have to be hosted in Google App Engine.
  • Wave Data API’s – Read or Write on behalf of a user – many ideas forming there.
  • Attachment and Media API’s – read and write attachments – again lots of ideas there.
  • There has been a new release of the Robots API which means that they can be more useful. Not only can they respond to user actions, but they can now update the wave on their own – cool!
  • Embed’s are now public – Everyone can see them (if you want). You don’t have to be logged in to Wave to see the wave – this is a huge opportunity to get your Wave’s out into the wild. Also, embed the wave in multiple places. Imagine this for live blogging an event – not just one person, but multiple people updating the wave live (and then play that back later with the video or slides – wow!).
One cool thing is that Wave is now integrated with Google Apps (GAFYD) accounts. By the end of the year when the other services like Picassa are enabled on GAFYD, I think it will be time for me to move over to using my GAFYD account as my primary account (I still use Gmail at the moment).

Wave almost works on my Android phone but is not quite there yet. There is no iPhone app (you can use it in mobile safari), but there are some people working on WaveLite which will help Wave’s look and perform better in a mobile web browser. Wave still does not work in IE without ChromeFrame. (Will IE 9 change this? I hope).

There was a great talk about Wave for the Enterprise (Slides Here). The talk had some great ideas and examples for the use of Wave in the Enterprise. Here are just a few of the points:

  • Wave is equal parts document and conversation – so that’s why it is a difficult paradigm shift for most people. And why the Wave author needs to set some rules or guidelines on how to structure the Wave.
  • Using Wave, people feel like they are actually working together. Multiple people can be “speaking” at the same time
  • Wave works best for a combination of structured and unstructured processes – semi-structured. Some structured / automated process, and then conversation around that, eg Notation of the exceptions.
  • An idea is to generate reporting waves that people can analyse and notate. A combination of people and robots working together on the process.
  • Automating the Wave (eg a robot that links back to the data on the intranet or other LOB systems).
  • Waves that act as an index to other Waves… (Like the DevFest Wave for this event – just a simple way to get some order into your Waves).

Overall, I do really think that Wave has come into it’s own and is now ready for prime time collaborations, within the enterprise, or for organising a community group, or just arranging dinner with friends.

Comments

  3. Chris Lang says

    Jodie, when you take what you have detailed above and then add in the fact that over 3 million college students are returning to school this fall with Google Apps as their email and document provider, with Google Wave waiting for them too, you really have something.

    An entire generation is going to grow up Google in college. 4 million more outside the US, and 2 million business users. Brown U says they expect to save a $1 mil in the first year alone with Google Apps.

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