I’ve been on Google Wave for less than 48 hours and a longer blog post is brewing. However I did just want to respond to a post by Mark Smithers today in which he described Google Wave in a Sentence as:
Google Wave is a tool that allows asynchronous communication (similar to email or discussion boards), semi-synchronous communications (similar to Twitter or FriendFeed) and synchronous communications (similar to instant messaging) all wrapped up with wiki-like capabilities for collaboration.
After only 48 hrs experience, really only abt 4 hours of actually poking about, I am tempted to agree with his assessment that students and teachers could use Waves as collaboration spaces. However, I’d like to see the file sharing capabilities first. This is switched off at the moment.
I’m less impressed with some of the mass waves with 300+ participants – they feel very chaotic. Mark calls them standing waves – I wonder if tsunamis is more apt? The Educators Directory Wave is a prime example. Everyone is talking (literally over each other as this is possible in a Wave), threads are difficult to discern, it’s hard to recognise individual contributions and the whole thing is liberally sprinkled with polls and maps. I wasn’t surprised when at about 4pm Google Wave warned me that this wave was about to explode.
So, after the initial 48 hours, here is my Google Wave description in a sentence:
Google Wave is like a wiki done by amateurs, a text chat with 120 participants and a discussion forum without a facilitator, all rolled into one.
I’m sure this will improve as we get the hang of making waves…
If you want to get in touch and improve with me, I’m nz.catspyjamas [at] googlewave.com
Completely agree. Wave is not for everyone. Looks like most value like come to better communication within companies and organisations. Although I am looking forward to being able to add waves to websites and see live editing of comments etc.
People are learning how to use Wave. It is new. The conventions for using it (e.g., not talking over each other) are emerging. The system itself is not yet finished (that’s why they call it a “beta test”).
Don’t expect perfection in the first few days in an unfinished, unreleased product filled with new users. Good grief.
@bill thanks for your comment Bill. It is exactly the chaos of this time as we attempt to figure out the conventions for using Wave, a new tool with new users, that I was trying to capture. Currently we are using it as an all-of-the-above tool – “make it do everything”.
I remember feeling similarly overwhelmed when I first got on Twitter. I can’t wait to see the community begin to create rules, conventions & habits to ride the Waves as we’ve done for Twitter with our @replies and #hashtags.
I have been using wave for a few weeks now and yes the education site is a mess/mass of new users. While it is new and full of bugs I have used it effectively for collaboration with across our small team as we collect links, tools and develop strategies. I have over the past few days enjoyed it as a forum to more detailed discussion post the Learntrends Webinar with Jay Cross, Jane Hart and other learning visionaries. hang in there….be good to touch base as I am also here in Hawke’s Bay
I agree that file sharing needs to be added. It would be great to incorporate Google Docs as well so work can be exported along the way. I imagine that once it is more widely used and developers spend more time on it, very powerful widgets will be created. That will be what sets it apart from typical chat and wikis.
Google Wave in a Word
GoodBye
Hehe that’s v funny. And true.