Why Thought Den won’t be surfing with Google Wave just yet…..
With seemingly the most popular tweet over the past few weeks revolving around spare Google Wave invites, you wouldn’t be the only one to anticipate a social media revolution behind the corner of the latest must have. However, I hope that its not just Thought Den who have been fairly let down by the much overhyped Google Wave…
- Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration
- “Within a Wave conversation users can communicate and work together with text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”
What is a Wave?
A Wave is effectively just a group conversation like you are used to having within Skype or MSN. However with Wave, any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants into any part the process.
“A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.” This is the most innovative part of Google Wave as no other application out there allows you to see a participants content update in real-time (IMO this is more of a selling point than the actual complete ‘Wave’)
The not so good bits
Although the only Thought Den experience of ‘Waving’ so far within has been between Rhys and Dan, within a much larger wave with dozens of employees i’m sure it would prove to be extremely hectic and confusing.
With the time taken for each user to understand the process of the Wave, and to build up an etiquette that will allow for a conversation that can take place in a more linear fashion, it seems at this point more beneficial to just have a conference call or use Skype chat. Although, with the product being open-source, i’m sure that there will be a plethora of apps released that are able to solve some of these initial problems.
Where could Thought Den benefit from Waving?
Sharing a PSD or Design in real-time between designers and developers, who could then discuss/edit/add to the design collaboratively become useful within the design community.
Furthermore, with a small number of users on a brainstorming exercise this approach could be more beneficial and structured than just passing around a long chain of emails with the latest versions of a document.
The real-time functionality (e.g collaborative zooming and positioning on maps) offers the most potential and will more than likely be a major player in future communication tools, although like most aspects of Wave, needs some tweaking.
Summary
Even though as of yet it hasn’t quite got the mix right, Google should be given brownie points for it’s attempt to provide a new slant on the modern format of social collaboration.
All in all however, the confusing complexity, steep learning curve and influx of functionality where simplicity is needed make for a generally unsatisfactory first experience. Due to the brand power of ‘Google’ there will be plenty of advocates that will prevent Wave’s demise; although for the time being it will create more of a ripple than a wave whilst everyone is still left wondering
‘What do I do with it’?
Tags: Google Wave