Imagine you spend a lot of time working on a variety of projects, sometimes with different teams.You come across a dynamic new type of meeting and collaboration space.  Just from a brief promotional video it’s obvious that this is a new way of thinking with immediate benefits for the way that you do things.  Better still, you can have an extended free trial. Problem is, the new meeting space doesn’t  integrate with any of your current projects and no-one you know can meet up with you there.  Some of the furniture is missing but someone thought it wouldn’t matter too much provided you could use a big Sudoku game  in the middle.  Next door, a bunch of people involved in education are experimenting with more than a hundred crammed into a space for  twenty. They’re all excited about having managed to get in at all and seem convinced it’s the future even if no-one can say why.  Ring a bell?

This is the story of Google Wave – an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. … can be both a conversation  and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more (Google blurb). How can something so patently useful be so wildly overhyped before troughing in despondancy for many?

The answer is partly that it is still product in early beta which generated a dangerous level of expectation. Also though, Wave  aims to facilitate a way of working which the early adopter folk all use and take for granted:  Skype, IM, Wiki, collaborative project tools etc.

A new recombination

For me Wave is something genuinely new where the ‘new’ means a clever recombination of existing elements. Potentially a re-invention of email with the more useful bits of wikis, instant messaging and blogs mixed in. Unlike useful collaborative Web 2.0 gizmos like wikis and web-based project management tools, Google Wave isn’t a tool which we can try out in a safe space “over there” because it would only come into its own if we had it as an everyday tool, completely integrated with (and a regular alternative to) our email.

For education?

Given that educators make enthusiastic use of collaborative tools such as wikis then Wave has plenty of potential there.  ELT and language teachers will revel in the ability to easily embed rich media with text. But really it’s a productivity tool for work environments.

For work

• Big, big time saving for consensus-though-email organisations. The sort of place where the choice is to have brutal email management or regularly stay late to catch up with mountains of mail. Where they have a “We don’t do work, we just do e-mail” ethos. The Wave benefit of keeping “a SINGLE copy of your ideas” would be massive here.

• Even though wikis are straightforward for many, they may be beyond ‘the many’ for whom email is the main work-based communication tool. Something which looks like mail or can be accessed from a mail interface would have much better take up
• Google want to sell the their tool suite to companies and Wave is aggregating front end for google docs. Useful Docs may be but they are also too flexible and very difficult to manage. Much better, in fact, to create and organise them from within a Wave. If in doubt trying running a big content project using a wiki vs one with Google Docs.

Wave promo plays on the real time elements for shock and awe. The  importance is that it doesn’t freeze or lose content when two people are working on it nearly synchronously, something which happens too often with Google Docs

Flexible collaboration

There is nothing new about collaborative tools (Lotus Notes anyone?) but they seem to be set up to support preconceived workflows rather than letting people decide when and how they wish to collaborate.

Go with the fl.. Wave

Wave also recognises that a lot of the information we deal with at work is either part of a larger whole or generates a new stream which continues to propegate inefficiently by people starting new individual communications i.e. an email which they selectively hook into the mother stream through selectively quoting parts of other messages and CC’ing some of the (many) others involved.

Unless you work in an area where skype and messenger chat are the norm, email probably still remains the defacto standard for professional communication.  Personal communications are becoming more nuanced though. For a young generation of course IM clients are the standard.  However,  even the huge numbers from older demographics  making increasing use of  Facebook and other social networking recently, know that posting a status update can save a lot of time in comparison to an email and uploading an album can save even more.  There is probably a tipping point there with people realising that getting into their usual email space, cranking out a whole new mail including laboriously deciding who to address it to  is beginning to seem like something  for special occasions.

As far as work practices go, that tipping point is probably further off but Google Wave and its imitators will change that.

Tags: Google Wave, social media