Google Wave

Gráinne Conole
11:25am 16 October 2009

Very intrigued by this and whether this is genuinely something different and unique or mainly hype. Also interested in how difficult it is to get a handle on this.

Niall Sclater
11:37am 16 October 2009 (Edited 11:55am 16 October 2009)

It's conceptually more complex than email or instant messaging for example and is not that intuitive.  But then spreadsheets might not be intuitive for someone who had never used them before either I guess.

It was also clear earlier when several of us were simultaneously editing a comment on a wave that conventions of use will have to evolve in order to prevent all hell breaking loose.

Jez Cope
11:53am 16 October 2009

It's a weird one! I think it's important not to over-egg Wave: there's been a lot of hype and a lot of people seem to expect it to be all things to all (wo)men.

From my experience so far, it's very simple and hits the sweetspot between email, IM and wikis. I think if Google get it right (and the syndication protocol's going to be important) Wave could be the way collaborative editing hits the mainstream.

I particularly like that you can begin, for example, by sending someone an email-like Wave, have a bit of a discussion, then edit the result into a more useable document, rinse and repeat.

Steven Verjans
2:19pm 16 October 2009

I would need to test it in a real-life collaboration to really see the effect. It compares rather well with Google Docs, because in Google docs it's hard to distinguish the contributions of the different authors. Maybe we should write a collaborative blogpost about Google Wave?

Next to the syndication that Jez mentions, a lot also depends on the way Wave collaborates with other social networking, I would think.

Terry Wassall
4:00pm 16 October 2009

Is this an appropriate place to compare notes on our experiences with Google Wave so far? Some of the issues will be temporary as the beta version is a bit rough and not everything has been implemented fully, i.e. user controls and permissions. There are a number of collaborative evaluations of GW already using GW (of course) and 'real' activities may emerge from these. I would be happy to add any GW users to mine or be added to others.

Niall Sclater
4:10pm 16 October 2009

It's as good a place as any, Terry.

Liam Green-Hughes
5:26pm 18 October 2009

I've added links to a couple of blog posts I've written on Google Wave. It strikes me that Wave has the "good enough" quality that will mean it gets used in a wide range of circumstances (like email gets used now, a fallback solution that everybody knows how to use) and the second post covers an extension to add video chat, this shows how Wave can be extended in terms of functionality and I guess it could mean that it could be integrated with institutional systems one day.

Gráinne Conole
2:34pm 25 October 2009

Just started to play - difficult to judge yet as I haven't had any real use of it. Found it slightly disorientating as a space to begin with but got used to it pretty quickly.

Verena Roberts
11:56pm 25 October 2009

Am furstrated by the whole google wave thing because you need an invite??? Am I correct? Is this the truth? Is there a way around this?

Gráinne Conole
12:57am 26 October 2009

unfortunately yes - its very annoying and something that puts me off the whole thing to be honest. Also there seems to be only a limited number of invites. All seems a bit of a big marketing hype...

Terry Wassall
2:24pm 26 October 2009 (Edited 5:34pm 26 October 2009)

Google is using the a more restricted version of the beta launch strategy they used for gmail in that a limited number of user accounts were set up initially but each of these had a number of invitations they could distribute. This worked ok for gmail as using a gmail account did not depend on others having gmail accounts too. It works less well with gwave as it doesn't make a lot of sense without collaborators. However, no doubt it will be opened up in due course. I have spent quite a lot of (too much) time in a variety of gwaves and I am sure it will be a useful addition. Most of the issue [removed][removed] s are due to lack of users and incomplete or missing functionality as well as the rather unfinished and clunky user interface. In particular I like the ability to embed discussions into specific locations in a text document and being able to expand or collapse these 'blip threads'.  I have tried to do this with Google docs and wiki pages before and it has not been entirely successful. 

Having spent time in gwaves for a few days and then returning here I am finding it frustrating that I cannot click on any of the messages above and add a comment and start a discussion around specific issues they raise - for instance gwave as an email client, emerging etiquette and protocols for simultaneous editing, and so on. I think gwave will eventually make  some collaborative environments feel quite flat and restrictive. Or they may be developed to be more like gwave!

Later edit: Just seen [removed][removed] in my text above. No idea where this came from!

Gráinne Conole
4:48pm 26 October 2009

I totally agree - it feels a bit false at the moment as it doesnt link to real email. Re: being able to click and interact anyway - good point, dunno how difficult that would be for cloudworks - we'll add to the list to look at. I do think though that there is a role for different types of collaborative spaces, They dont all have to have the same affordances - wikis and blogs for example have differnet strengths and weaknesses. I guess as i see it at the moment cloudworks sits more towards the collective blog space than a collaborative wiki...

Jez Cope
5:05pm 26 October 2009

@Gráinne: I agree, without the link to email it does have the annoyance of being "another place to check". Hopefully it won't be long before there is some kind of notification widget or desktop client or something so you don't have to keep going back to check for updates.

I think one of Wave's big strengths is that it makes ad hoc collaboration easier. You don't need to set up a new wiki (or wiki page) to start collaborating, just send someone a wave. I sent a message to a friend suggesting we try to write a blog post using it, and now that message itself is developing into the blog post, with discussion scattered throughout.

Terry Wassall
5:43pm 26 October 2009 (Edited 5:52pm 26 October 2009)

Just re-read my entry and sounds a bit more enthusisatic about GW than I meant! I think I am enthusiastic about what it could be rather than what it is at the moment. I absolutely agree Gráinne about different affordances. I think Google Wave will probably make a poor wiki and a standard discussion board would be a better choice for some sorts of focused discussions. Speaking of discussion boards, I think there is much more mileage in these yet despite them being rather unfashionable these days. I think there are a lot of exciting web  tools around now and we are still struggling a bit to develop imaginative ways of using them that aren't just modified ways of doing old things.

Gráinne Conole
12:44pm 27 October 2009

@jez totally agree re: email alert - seems to make a big different in cloudworks. Interesting we had lots of requests to have RSS feeds for cloudworks - which we now have - but dont know how much people are actually using them. @Terry yes there is a danger of getting *too* clever, with too much funtionality - at the end of the day we need to tools to be able to i) find and manage information/content ii) communicate with others - its as simple as that! My feeling with cloudworks is to try and keep simple, to stick to our notion of "social clouds' rather than layer in lots of additional complexity.

Terry Wassall
11:35am 28 October 2009

Yes. I prefer simple and intuitive apps. Those that suffer from feature creep rarely end up that way. One possibility of course is for users to be able to mix and add functionality themselves and this is why I have been experimenting with embedding waves in Wordpress blog posts and pages. This works pretty well it seems. I also use Google sites quite a bit and I can see possibilities for having entire pages in a Google site as a wave, or embedded within a page. Might be useful to be able to embed waves in traditional VLEs as well, like Blackboard, or integrated with Moodle. But gwave needs a lot of work before it can be used easily more widely than the 'usual suspects' I'm mostly sharing waves with!

Nathan Lomax
6:23am 1 November 2009

This seems a good way to provide a 'default' collaborative writing tool as there are so many around (Googledocs, etherpad etc). It will be interesting to see the take up.

In response to:

"conventions of use will have to evolve in order to prevent all hell breaking loose"

I agree and was wondering if some kind of faint writing may appear to eliminate overwriting or editing conflicts.

Gill Clough
8:57am 19 February 2010

We have just started using Google Wave on the xDelia project and so far it seems pretty useful. Hanging around waiting for our invites delayed the start, so much so we'd almost forgotten GW existed. Then after a particularly intense email dialogue that was almost synchronous, we decided to give it a try to see how it worked. Two of us played around synchronously to get the hang of all the features and then we started a  wave as a way of collaboratively recording our notes and actions arising out of meetings. 

We are geographically distributed, and these meetings are held using computer video conferencing (Flashmeeting or Adobe Connect) and attended by partners in Spain, UK and Sweden (for this part of the project). It was very helpful to all be able to collaborate on a shared record of the meeting. Also, it was really useful to be able to go back and update actions etc in a single place.

We tend to have a big messy collaborative wave initiated before and developed during a meeting. Then we create separate waves for each action we decide upon at the meeting. These are much "cleaner". We move the content of the waves to the wiki as they become stable.

There are extensions for Google Chrome and Firefox that run in the background and notify you when somebody has added to a wave you participate in. On firefox, there is a little google W in the bottom corner of the browser - at the moment it is showing a 2 which tells me there have been two new entries since I last looked.

The main disadvantage at the moment seems to be a difficulty in extracting the content of the wave into another format. However we have been using cut and paste to synthesise the outcomes of our meetings into the shared group wiki and this has been OK so far.

The main advantage is having a single location that we can all contribute, in which, through the browser extensions, notifies us when something has changed.

And it certainly saves on emails! :)

Gráinne Conole
1:38pm 19 February 2010

Thanks for sharing this Gill - good to get a real case study of the use of google wave for a genuine activity!

Harry Sherman
5:07pm 13 June 2011

I think google wave has somewhat flopped.  It was produced to replace email but looking at the way things are going I see facebook / social media sites replacing email.

Google's new chromebooks are where I believe eductaion and non profits will grow.