Google Wave Invites : The Giving Season is upon us!
Google Wave has been in a very closed private beta since May 2009 but recently announced plans to bump the Beta up by 100,000 people. My additional invites showed up right before Thanksgiving.
I’ve been using Wave on and off for about a month and didn’t really ‘get’ it. At first it just seemed like ANOTHER inbox to check in order to correspond with people. For the first month or so, that was my experience. I really did not have many people in my contact list and for the few I did have in my contact list, I did not have a need to collaborate with them. Up until then, my normal email had been a superior contact tool.
After returning from the GestaltIT Tech Field Day in San Jose, many of us were eager to give Wave a test run as a platform for creating some collaborative posts for the event. This little experiment has changed my view on Wave a bit.
Wave seems to be an excellent tool for :
- Event driven discussions with multiple people providing insight and suggestions for a conversation. Wave allows people to view the conversation ‘as is’, rather than sifting through email to piece together the current status of things. I could see this being useful for planning events, reunions, parties, get togethers, etc.. assuming all participants actually have access to and use Google Wave.
- Creating collaborative web oriented posts or articles. I am not sure about actual documents since I haven’t figured out how to integrate Google Docs into it to export to a DOC file.
- Although real-time collaboration is allowed, I think this platform is best for staggered collaboration where people are visiting the wave, catching up and contributing. Very similar to a private wiki of sorts.
One thing I would like to see in a later version of Wave is email alerting; Although this seems a bit redundant since I am sure Google would like Wave to BE your Inbox, for me it is just another pointed tool for the above scenarios. It takes a conscious effect to check in on the wave to see if there has been any updates to it.
If you’ve read this far down the page and still want a Wave invite, shoot me an email or drop a comment in the comments. 🙂 I have 13 for now, first come first serve.
My Google Wave Address is CCostanVM @ GOOGLEWAVE.COM