Re: Google Wave - what's the point?

Hi Buck

I had the same re-action as you and have been trying to envision what it
might become. In terms of existing products it is somewhere between OneNote
and IRC in my opinion; the documentation/note-taking aspects of OneNote
combined with the immediacy and inclusiveness of real time chat.

In terms of its documentation capabilities it has a way to go before
matching the formatting options and features of one-note (not that that is
by any means perfect!). This is one of the frustrating things about creating
a wave - you can't creat something as simple and obvious as a table for
instance. If Microsoft put OneNote on the web as a proper cloud app it would
really lift the bar for what is expected of wave.

The immediacy of response aspect is good when working together but has the
potential to create a lot of chaos. I looked at a lot of the public waves
available and they were just messes. It needs a lot more work to allow items
to "pinned" (always visible), items to be "closed" (no more responses) and
the ability to define individuals roles and parts of the document in the
wave needs to be enhance to become more like a CMS. Perhaps working with a
smaller group would overcome this aspect of it.

That sais I can see where it would help collaboration - I work with
different people on a regular basis and email can be really frustrating to
try and develop an idea in. Nothing worse than emails crossing and
addressing the same issues - I always like to get straight on the phone when
that happens, but that can be a time waster as well.

I take the point that someone else made - alpha code and still pretty rough,
but I think it needs a lot more in the way of apps and plug-ins (the bots
concept seems cool as well) to be really useful and a lot of this can be and
has been done in web pages.

It's an ambitious idea but ... it will be interesting to see what becomes of
it.

Regards
Evan Harris

-----Original Message-----
From: pctech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:pctech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Buck
Sent: Tuesday, 1 December 2009 4:18 a.m.
To: pctech@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [PCTECH] Google Wave - what's the point?

I don't see the point of Google Wave. It's intended to be this
collaboration enhancer, but unless one has a plug-in for the app one is
collaborating with, it seems like a really slow, really buggy sort of
instant messenger client.

About the only plug-in that seems useful right now is Google Maps. So
it'd be great if one is trying to find a site for a family reunion or
something like that, where some people are in a different time zone and
can't participate in real time. It seems marginally better than
emailing a link back and forth I guess.

Say I wanted to collaborate with a ukulele player and write a bit of
music. Yesterday, I'd call him on the phone, put it on speaker and off
we'd go. During the call, we'd play some, and then write the notes down
on music scoring paper. At the end, we'd enter it into a music editing
program and the score would then be in electronic form.

How would I use Wave to do that?

Perhaps a better question: What do you use Wave to collaborate on?
--buck