Earlier this week Sitewire participated in agencyside’s BOLO Conference, and used Google Wave to document the event. It was an interesting experiment, and showed both the potential and limitations of Wave
Wave is a new offering from Google that attempts to change the way people collaborate and communicate online. It merges notes, video, email, and other items into an ongoing flow of information. There is a short video summary of the concept you can watch, and Wikipedia has a nice article as well. Right now the service is invite-only.
It’s very raw at the moment, but we wanted to give it a test drive so threw out an offer on Twitter for anyone at the BOLO conference who had access to Wave to let us know. We added them to a single wave and ended up with 18 participants and 89 messages, with each person adding their own ideas however they wanted.
First Impressions
In general, people used Wave like a giant, real-time message board. Specifically:
- There was an embedded map of the venue and overall logistic information added to the Wave. This made a nice repository of information easily referenced by everyone in the Wave.
- During keynotes, someone would start document points the speaker made. Others could either reply or contribute/edit directly to the notes. It created a decent, somewhat crowd-assembled capture of the relevant material.
- People organized coffee and lunch runs, and had generic chats on everything from the value of conferences to the weather.
- No real surprise, but participation seemed to parallel general community models where a few people added most of the information, a lot of people added a few notes, and some just lurked.
Technical Notes
Wave is in Preview (not even a Beta launch), but here are some of the technical notes:
- Wave was good about reporting “unsynced” waves, but was finicky about allowing me to sync the changes I had made to the Wave. It didn’t seem to be tied to connectivity, as I was able to navigate other sites just fine.
- The “read” “unread” marking options also seemed spotty. Trying to mark a large Wave as “read” was unsuccessful, while a smaller Wave took the marking without issue.
- Ability to embed full sub-Waves with entirely different groups of participants is a powerful feature, allowing people to spin-off on a topic and work on it in private.
- Inability to collapse threads and hide Read items made it difficult to navigate once the Wave grew. Most new conversations started happening at the end of the Wave rather than in more relevant spots in the middle because they were difficult to find. Looking back, it might have been helpful to start new waves for major topics, rather than keeping all the disparate information about the conference in one spot.
Overall Thoughts
We tried having a few people collaborate on this blog post as a Wave, but we couldn’t find a way to export the data so used Google Docs instead:
- People used it mostly as a threaded discussion board, and not taking full advantage of the collaborative aspects. There may be some very ingrained habits that users will need to shake for Wave to be effective.
- Multi-person, real time collaboration was interesting to watch – especially in a keynote where people were adding their own thoughts and modifying others comments for clarity.
- What the application lacks in UX, it may make up for in intuitive development. I searched for a way to add video, gave up, and decided just to post a link to a YouTube video found on a different tab. Upon the paste, Google Wave suggested I embed the video. And then did it. Automatically. I didn’t have to go back to YouTube and nab the embed code. Smart.
- The ability to play a Wave back from the start and see every change along the way is very interesting, especially the ability to pick any point in a Wave and step back and forth to see how it developed.
Gian Tripani has a list of Wave Use Cases at Lifehacker that are a lot more in depth than our experiment here, but underscores there is some amazing potential in this tool. Right now it is very raw, but it will be fascinating to see what emerges as it matures.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I really enjoyed using wave and I would love to see it replace twitter. The reason I think it should replace twitter is it allows you to create Groups. On Twitter I struggle with trying to cater to 2 audience’s my work/industry audience and my close friends that could care less about my industry.
2 Complaints- 1. Google wave doesn’t have spell check 2. There isn’t a good notification mechanism, for example if someone sends you an IM or Text you know it, but if someone tried to reach out to you for immediate information and you didn’t happen to have the wave open you wouldn’t see it.
This was very interesting. I am looking forward to trying it out once I get an invite. One area I would like to see how this works is in collaboration on group projects when the participants are spread out around the world.
Does it have video conferencing capabilities too? That would be cool.
There’s an extension you can install for conferencing that allows video – but it’s obviously still in beta and I haven’t tried it. The cool thing about wave is that the API is open to developers to create all kinds of plug-ins and capabilities for wave beyond what Google originally built in.
For the most part I’m struggling to see the breakthrough that is Wave. People are excited since its from Google. However, keep in mind Orkut (social networking) is also from Google and it went nowhere. Having said that, I felt like I was able to follow the conference even though I wasn’t attending. I checked in from time to time to see how things were going. But then again I was also doing through through Twitter hashtag.
The fact that its a threaded discussion is very helpful. The lack of a thread has been my biggest complaint for Twitter. This makes the conversation very easy to follow as we all know.
However, beyond all the potential, here are my questions:
1. What is it that you can do on Wave that you can’t do on any other forum?
2. How is this different from a Chat room? Or IM? Or even Twitter for that matter?
So far, I’m not impressed with this offering. Your thoughts?
@Shailesh – I think the potential power of Wave is that it is more integrated than email, forums, etc. You can edit other peoples entries, bring in different media, and it all blends together.
But people aren’t used to working that way. Even wikis turn a lot of people away as a collaboration tool, and they are a lot easier to understand. There is also only a fraction of the overall capability Google is talking about developing in place, so it is premature to make any final judgment. Like most things with Google, it’s a great idea and time will tell if it really matures into something valuable.
Andrew – Wave has as much chance in replacing Twitter as mobile phones have a chance at replacing bowling night. They’re so different as to be classified as unrelated. Though I do agree with you on the notification piece.
Shailesh:
1. Focus. Forums succeed when there tons of new threads. Wave focuses the conversation, keeping it one thread.
2. Multimedia, better threading, and playback, to start.
Wave is a lot less “social” than people originally intended. It’s an interesting application of social and collaboration. If you have a need for that, you’re likely to be more impressed.
very interesting post, thank you, I haven’t discovered a few things you mentioned.
I hope google wave won’t replace twitter – I don’t want people to see what I am typing real time – I prefer to read my message after I typed it in and then refine it.
Twitter hasn’t got groups – but it will have lists, Twitter is for shorter 1 to 1 discussions.
You can group conversations and talk to many people on google wave – but when discussion grows big it gets messy
I think it’s a big problem with current online discussions – that’s why I have been working on something to change it – we currently need beta testers – if you wanna try it DM me your email on http://twitter.com//rockyoo or sign up on http://yoomoot.com
p.s. so far google wave is awesome for me in only one aspect – collaborative sudoku!