Managed to get Google Wave access yesterday and have been testing out the various features. An area of interest to me is how to best reduce the UI clutter of various windows and incoming streams as I keep up to date with news and try to work at the same time.
The concept of waves to mash up all the various streams into conversation threads seems like a great idea but definitely requires more polish to succeed. I can see myself using it if gmail was tied directly in today. The idea of “wiki” style collaboration on documents in real time could really improve how things work in most places. However the barrier would be resistance to change (happens in any product that dramatically changes how people work). Google’s idea of pushing their brand and products to schools (great work on signing up MOE) is definitely the right step to get young minds hooked and warm up to the idea of new ways to work and collaborate.
Some gadgets I’ve tried
- Wavr which allows embedded waves in self-hosted wordpress
- Tweety that provides Twitter conversation in Wave. This could potentially remove the need for Tweetdeck, Yammer clients running right now!
- http://wave-samples-gallery.appspot.com/about_app?app_id=5002
- Great guide with screens on how to add Tweety access http://daggle.com/add-twitter-google-wave-1424
- Map and Yes/No/Maybe Gadgets are pretty cool on what’s possible to built as extensions
While waiting for the invite (took 2 weeks!) I came across some good reads and discussion on this very early dev release (thanks Google for the invite, hopefully more will be able to experience a more polished product soon).
- How Google Wave could transform journalism
- Turning the tide: a hands-on look at Google’s Wave
- Google Wave’s Best Use Cases
Lastly, here’s an embedded wave just to test out the interaction
[wave id=”googlewave.com!w+3ZQOxMf0E”]
Michael Ong 