Presenters: Rebecca Jones & Bob Keith
Jones was excited to have something that combined chat with cloud applications like Google Docs. Wave is a beginning, but still needs work. Google is not risk-averse, so they put it out and let us bang on it to shape it into something useful.
More people joined Google Wave and abandoned it than those who stuck with it (less than 10% of the room). We needed something that would push us over to incorporating it into our workflows, and we didn’t see that happen.
The presenters created a public wave, which you can find by searching “with:public tag:cil2010”. Ironically, they had to close Wave in order to have enough virtual memory to play the video about Wave.
Imagine that! Google Wave works better in Google Chrome than in other browsers (including Firefox with the Gears extension).
Gadgets add functionality to waves. [note: I’ve also seen waves that get bogged down with too many gadgets, so use them sparingly.] There are also robots that can do tasks, but it seems to be more like text-based games, which have some retro-chic, but no real workflow application.
Wave is good for managing a group to-do list or worklog, planning events, taking and sharing meeting notes, and managing projects. However, all participants need to be Wave users. And, it’s next to impossible to print or otherwise archive a Wave.
The thing to keep in mind with Wave is that it’s not a finished product and probably shouldn’t be out for public consumption yet.
The presentation (available at the CIL website and on the wave) also includes links to a pile of resources for Wave.
