Tag Archives: google_wave

The Wave fizzled – or did it?

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wave_220x14715703.jpgA few months back I had a “light bulb moment” and wrote about the potential for workplace communication and collaboration that I was starting to see in Google Wave. Soon after writing that piece, I started to see a rapid decline in Wave’s usage among my fellow early adopters. It was easy to see why. Google Wave was available by invitation-only, and this obviously hurts buy-in from potential collaborators. It was also a tad buggy and undeveloped, as is typical in a “beta” offering.

Over the past few months, though, I’ve observed a pickup in interest around Wave, and this was due to a number of things:

  1. Google finally removed the “invitation-only” restriction, and allowed anyone with an e-mail address to be added to a wave.
  2. The development of many more gadgets, robots and other extensions that potentially made Wave more useful.
  3. The development of stand-alone and mobile applications for Wave.
Thanks to these developments and the pickup in buzz (again) I’d observed in the educational technology community, I decided to put last year’s “light bulb moment” to the test. I’ve moved a few of the projects I’ve got going at work into Wave, in the hopes of facilitating focused conversations and collaboration around these projects. I was starting to see just a little traction, and was contemplating my next blog post’s focus on these efforts, when, suddenly…
Google announced it was killing Wave. As in, stopping development immediately, and stopping the hosting of Wave by the end of the year.
What are the lessons to be learned here? Well, it was obviously a business decision on Google’s part. Many successful new technologies follow an adoption pattern of hype/early adopters, followed by a lag in interest (read “flat” or “slow” uptake, or perhaps even a drop), followed again by steady mass adoption. We saw this model perfectly with Twitter – enthusiastic early adopters, followed by a lag, followed by a slow steady mass adoption to the point where it is today. Was that secondary uptick curve not looking good enough to Google? Was there no secondary uptick curve at all, with me only seeing slow returning enthusiasm among my peers in the ed tech community? We may never know. As I said, it’s a business decision. In a tough economy especially, it’s probably necessary to let go of our sunk costs in projects that we may be altruistically attached to, but where returns don’t justify continued investment. (It was definitely a rather sudden announcement though, even the Google Wave Blog makes no mention of it as of the time of this posting.)
I still think there’s hope. Wave is mostly open-source, and someone else might pick it up, perhaps even turning out an enterprise version. A company with good business sense would learn the lessons from Google’s mistakes and improve the user experience, attempt to understand real world use cases, write better documentation, market it well, etc. All in all, I still strongly feel that a focused, multimodal, real-time communication platform like this has vast potential in terms of keeping people and projects on track. As I said back in November, I find e-mail to be cognitively distracting and a terrible way for collaboration to happen. I can say the same thing about Twitter (sorry Twitter fanboys and fangirls). It’s all just too much noise.
I’m very interested to hear your thoughts in comments.

Google Wave possibilities

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There’s a lot of discussion taking place in the teaching and learning community about Google Wave. Google Wave is a new communications tool that’s a little hard to describe but I’d say it’s a combination of a real-time threaded discussion and wiki tool. Not only can you use the tool to reply to the postings of others (the “threaded discussion” part), but you can also edit the posts of others and even create collaborative documents (the “wiki” part). It’s a little tricky to get used to (the real time typing feature is disconcerting to many) and it’s still a little buggy (currently it’s still invitation only). Oh I must mention too the ability to embed media, share images, and embed “gadgets” which look like collaborative tools that are developed by the community to work with Google Wave (a “poll” tool is one that I have seen).

Like many early adopters that have been kicking the tires with this tool, I’ve been playing around while developing a small community of contacts to collaborate with. While I have yet to use this tool on any “real” projects, I think I’ve finally seen the light in terms of potential in my personal sphere of work and life. Let me elaborate.
Recently I returned from a somewhat extended vacation, during which I was largely out of touch with my workmates. As I was coming home on the train (a great way to travel if you have the opportunity, by the way), I started to feel the dread of returning to the office and sorting through the inevitable pile of e-mail. Don’t get me wrong, I love most aspects of my job, but e-mail is one of those things I tend to feel neutral-to-hostile towards. One of the things that is especially challenging is doing the detective work of piecing together an ongoing e-mail conversation. We’ve all seen it and dealt with it: the chain of “Reply All”s within a workgroup. Not only does this become inefficient over time, since most actors in the chain simply copy the same text over from earlier in the chain, but it’s terribly difficult, at least for me, to do the detective work of reconstructing the conversation as it happened over time. Essentially I end up reading “backwards” since my instinct is to read from top-to-bottom but this happens to be the reverse of the conversation timeline. (Incidentally, this is why Twitter is not a top tool within my personal learning environment – I face the same conundrum of trying to reconstruct conversations in reverse and generally find this frustrating.) 
How I see Google Wave really working for me to overcome this scenario is that I can easily jump in or back in to a conversation and not feel like I really missed anything. Conversations are threaded so I can easily see the context of replies. I can even use the “playback” feature to get a sense for exactly how the conversation played out, when edits were made, etc. Essentially the conversation and the collaboration are all there in one place for my review. No need to don my “detective” hat and try to recreate based on the bits and pieces I’ve gathered. Sort of like putting my work on “Tivo” while I’m away.
I welcome your thoughts and comments, as I am still learning about this new tool.