Google Wave,  a new way to communicate and collaborate with colleagues and friends but is it really any good and how could this be useful?

A New Concept with huge potential, and I’m sure it will become more popular as more people encounter it. I did face one problem when a colleague asked me, ‘what is it?’; “well, its like outlook and erm, MSN but you can drag files into your email/messages – which are called waves and edit existing messages. You can also ‘rewind’ a message so you can see the changes that its gone through, it’s all based in a web-browser so I guess its also like twitter but with the ability to edit twits and there aren’t limitations in terms of character count or text only communication?!?!’ … I didn’t understand what I said either!

It’s hard to get your head around and it’s like explaining how to use a computer to your eighty year old grandparents.

Confusion

Okay, so I’ve not been on Google Wave for the past few months and not used it all that much, so I’ll sign in. I’m greeted with a few existing waves welcoming me to it but I don’t have time to mess about with those, let’s give it ago. It’s at this point you feel a little lost, it’s easy to create a wave and add contacts to it (not that I really have any contacts using it), but you expect much more in terms of help and guidance (although there are a few ‘templates’ which show examples of usage and that you could actually use).

There’s a few ‘gadgets’ too such as Google maps and some form of voting system that I’ve acquired but that’s about it. I think the main problem is that not many people are using it yet and many of my friends haven’t even heard of it! Unfortunately, they must be signed up to this so I guess  its more like a social network than a new form of email.

I would also be interested in seeing ways in which this could be integrated into a website. The example I found searching google was very cluttered however, with many people replying to a single wave. Overall, I think the potentials huge but until it gains popularity, it isn’t as wonderful as I’d hoped. Has anyone else had chance to use this yet? what are your thoughts?

Discuss Google Wave on the Insight Forum

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About the Author:
Daniel Moore is an IT expert at Insight (http://uk.insight.com). He has worked in the Technical Services department giving both pre-sales and post-sales advice. He can now be found working on new projects for the website.
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