/Big Question/ Wave function
08/01/2010 | Filed under Discover > Big Question
What are your first impressions of Google Wave?
PR guru
Nancy Prendergast
Tannissan Mae
As a tool to enable real time communication, allow the sharing of pretty much any content type, and automatically track conversations, Wave could do lot to streamline work processes. With the real-time dimension, I can see it promoting both closer interaction and on-the-spot creativity. And anything that puts an end to clunky shuffling back and forth of content can only be a good thing.
Users are already exploring the potential of Wave in weird and wonderful ways, whether as we’ve already seen, recreating Pulp Fiction in Wave form, or playing RPGs in groups. It will be interesting to see if it can morph into a social media tool to take on the likes of Twitter.
Creative collaboration; ceaseless, seamless communication; content connecting. Love it.
Nancy is founder of PR company Tannissan Mae
Hosting specialist
Neil Barton
Hostway, UK
Google Wave is clearly Google’s next step towards becoming the all-encompassing web communications company it strives to be. Google believes that Wave will reinvent the way we communicate and collaborate with each other on the web in a major way. However, I do think that Google still has some way to go in order to educate everyday web users about its potential benefits.
On the outside, it does appear to be little more than a combination of email and instant messaging on steroids. But if you look beyond that I can see real potential when it comes to true real-time collaboration and the sharing of information, whether it is editing documents with colleagues or simply sharing photos with friends.
From a business perspective, having the appropriate levels of security and reliability is paramount, and currently Wave doesn’t provide this. However, I can see Wave’s real-time capabilities being a big incentive for the likes of Microsoft to take SharePoint’s collaboration functionality to the next level, which will clearly be of benefit to business users.
As Wave is open source it will be interesting to see where the developer community will take it, particularly with the current trend for community built applications, but I can see Wave moving into the mainstream very quickly. The question is, will Wave become equally as indispensable as Google’s other services such as Search, Gmail and Maps?
Neil is the director of Hostway UK
Hosting guru
Dominic Monkhouse
PEER 1
Yes I have an account. Errrr, what’s it for? Not yet worked it out.
Dominic Monkhouse is UK MD at PEER 1
Comms experts
Evan Adelman
Likemind
A common misconception occurs when people evaluate Google Wave – they forget that Wave is in fact a protocol, not just a single Google service. And that protocol at first take is brilliant even though the service sitting on top is confusing the hell out of some initial beta testers. Google’s vision for transforming online conversations reaches beyond this trial – hoping there will be as many Wave servers as there are email servers today. With the vision clearly set on completely transforming online conversations, I’m not underestimating their prowess in revolutionizing a seemingly ingrained technology.
However, Wave is pushing boundaries and making bets that users will change several deeply engrained behaviours. Users need to switch from thinking and acting linearly about online conversations (email, chat, forums, even twitter) to an asynchronous model – which again, is a basic human behaviour that will have significant barriers to entry.
And, unlike Search, Gmail, Google Voice, Calendar, and Google Docs, in order for Wave to be useful, let alone truly powerful, everyone in your conversation network needs to have a Wave account – either on Google’s servers or elsewhere. Here, Google is counting on two curves of adoption – first in Google Wave, then in the ubiquity of everyone having a Wave account somewhere in the federation of Wave servers.
Evan Adelman is technical lead at corporate communications agency Likemind
Software specialist
Siim Vips
Modera
I have not seen and experienced Google Wave yet, but from technical and administrative point of view it’s a huge step forward. We all know that e-mail standards are more than 40 years old and not always the most effective communication tool. A major reason why e-mail has not progressed into a more useful means of communication is due to the lack of new standards.
I really don’t see Google Wave as service yet, I’m more interested in the standards and how that could change the way users behave with this type of platform. Google Wave will hopefully help to push bigger changes through with Google’s broad customer base and open doors for new standards, bringing the long waited efficiency to our every day lives.
Siim Vips is founder and CEO of Modera
Ecommerce expert
Ben Dyer
Actinic
Google wave has made me feel, well, sea sick. After sitting through the colossal 80 minute demo I was sold, I can now summarise my feelings into two words: EPIC DISAPPOINTMENT
First things first, Wave is basically glorified IRC. I spent ages hunting for the secret sauce, the game changing functionality or the hidden menu that said, “I’ll do your work, take the day off”. I couldn’t find it, maybe it will be in the production release.
I had fun with a few of the plug-ins ... for about three minutes. This was with the only other person I knew that had an account, the poor lost and wandering soul.
The thing that has irritated me more than anything is the terrible way it’s been rolled out. My life is run via Google apps, my team are spread all over the world and team chat is done via Skype. I can’t think of a more perfect case study. Sadly, I’m the only one with an invite.
I understand the concept of beta software. I also understand the idea of building excitement though a limited availability. However, given the massive hype, the under delivery and the poor execution, I wonder if Google do.
Ben Dyer is director of product development at Actinic
Media & PR expert
Tim Gibbon
Elemental Communications
After months of excitedly waiting for a first look at Google Wave, currently I am a little underwhelmed, although it is still very early days. However, it’s a developer paradise at the moment and not really a platform for users to thrive. Given that I have only experienced the ability to invite 20 people so far (which is pretty much like the Google Gmail approach when it first came out), the full capabilities are not being realised because it’s a service that benefits from multiple contacts being involved in conversations.
I haven’t experienced many Google Wave crashes (and I currently use it through Google Chrome and Mozilla), so on that front I am pleased. The room for growth as a support (or even replacement to email) is clear, but at the moment inviting and getting people interested is more than challenging. There are just a couple of things that I would like to see (which I am sure is coming); connecting email to the Google Wave (and particularly Gmail) so there isn’t a need for the googlewave.com email, the ability to remove a person from a Wave. I can’t see it being a replacement or upgrade to email for me, even in offline mode because I tend to store my emails in drafts until I’m ready to send them. The service will become more intuitive the more it is used, but until it does, it’s not going to fully win me over.
It’s also not apparent to some (or new) Gmail / Google users that they can create a Google Profile like http://www.google.com/profiles/tim.gibbon, which within Google Wave does make things easier (you can set how much information you wish to share). I can see the benefits of it in the future as a collaboration tool and how it could upset that market, particular if it remains a free, or even a low-cost service. We’ve been waiting for a new entrant and this could be it once the powerful functionality and apps arrive, which I am sure are on the way.
Tim is director of Elemental Communications
Social media and comms expert
Rachel Hawkes
Elemental Communications
I’m going to predict that most of the replies to this Big Question will be along the lines of, “Wave has massive potential but it’s early days.” ... and I think that’s a pretty fair summary. When they first announced Google Wave, like many .net readers I’m sure, I sat through that long video and was pretty blown away. Only I didn’t stop at watching it once. I must have watched that video from start to finish at least ten times... I made a point of sitting down with friends who don’t really get excited at things like this, waxing lyrical about how exciting it will be, a proper market shaker and how it will even benefit them. I managed to get a level of excitement out of my technophobe friends, and thought, “they’ll see I was right when it launches.”
I waited impatiently for my invite and in the process drove my colleague Tim a bit mad. I have about 10 people to wave at, and so far, it’s ‘OK.’ I’m really gutted that it didn’t launch with more than one or two applications and even though they are promised to be coming soon it would have been prudent to give the early adopters have something to maintain their initial excitement until the service opened up.
In my ‘spare time’ I run a charity, and we use Google Mail to manage our emails, Google Pages as an internal document library and Google Docs to create embedded surveys for our members. I will almost certainly be introducing Wave to manage internal comms and project management more effectively... but not yet. I need for Wave to be at the stage where they will be able to quickly and easily see the benefits in order for them to ‘get it’ and start using it. It’s not there yet by a long way and introducing it now will only make it that much harder for me to get them to use it as it was intended when it’s at that point.
My only major gripe about Wave is that I can’t integrate my email. Ideally, I would like to be using Wave for standard email as well as to wave at people. Particularly until it opens up to a wider audience, as it will prompt me to keep logging in, where as now, there’s not really many people to wave at and there’s no applications for me to play with. So, unlike my email account, I check Wave perhaps once a day at most. Hopefully email integration will come soon, and just in case someone from the Google Wave team is reading this, I’ll add a ‘pretty please’ at the end.
As for my friends, when they asked if Wave was as exciting as I was proclaiming it to be, I have to feign a bit of enthusiasm and say, “not yet, but soon!!”
Rachel is account director at Elemental Communications
Project manager
Ané-Mari Peter
on-IDLE
It’s going to take a ground swell of user adoption to make Google Wave work effectively. I’ve been fortunate enough to get a Wave account, but there’s a real lack of users out there so the features I want to try are either inappropriate (other Wave users are work colleagues and not interested in planning my next city break) or we’re already using collaboration tools. But, word has it that Wave is the next big thing so we’ve done a fair amount of play-collaboration to see if it can replace the myriad of existing tools we’re using currently.
I’m in two minds about brining all my email into Wave as some of it is confidential and personal, meaning I will always have to run two email accounts in addition to the myriad of other accounts I already have for testing purposes. But the collaboration aspect of Wave is its most appealing – switching from email to live chat will save many, many hours of to-and-fro with customers and colleagues on the same project. Now add document editing and I can do everything in one space, which so far has proved quite easy to use. The email search, categorisation and tagging features are superb – no more fiddling about in Gmail for me, this interface is the way to go. I can also get rid of Google Docs, which I’ve been using on client projects as a central repository, but most importantly to control versioning on project testing and amends lists.
When the collaboration gets to more than four people at the same time though it starts to get a bit hectic. It’s like driving in London – you need eyes at the back of your head with everything going on. Skype/IM here still works better when in groups. The interface works well at the moment with a small amount of content – we’re testing this at the moment so it’s going to be interesting to see how flexible the interface really is.
Ané-Mari is the co-founder of on-IDLE
Bookmark with:
