Google Wave: Maybe not so bad after all!

When Google Wave came out i didn’t like it at all because i knew it meant adding another inbox to my list So i basically ignored it for weeks. Then my friends and colleagues started popping up in wave. They invited me to all kinds of waves and i still ignored it. LOL.

So they started working without me. Eventually i got in on the action and started WORKING with them on some waves. And that’s what it really is: You don’ t mail, you don’t instant message… you work with a group of people around a topic. Once you have a serious cause and once people don’t just test out all the formatting options Google Wave offers, the tool is actually really good, you know.

I was starting to understand the true value of Google Wave. It is the tool for collaboration around text. Not the best at emailing, not the best at messaging or any of that. Its specifically a collaboration tool. Maybe it’ll get better at email like stuff (filters, etc) or instant messaging stuff but it doesn’t really matter for me.

You WORK on a wave. There is no more emailing ABOUT work or about a document that needs to be changed. You do it directly in the wave. So really it safes a lot of time when it is used right.

Right now we are creating the training manual for a social media class we are about to give in Munich through my new social media consulting company greenYonda (german).

5 or so people work on the wave at the same time hammering out all the topics involved. For that kind of stuff Wave is really good.

In the past is used Skype a lot for that kind of collaboration work but now i have to admit Google Wave has the upper hand. With Skype you always needed another tool (like Google Docs). Also you can’t simply invite someone to a Skype conversation and he goes back in time to see what happened and how the conversation came about. Plus a wave is not a conversation… It’s so much more. For example you can edit everywhere and not just in your part of the wave. Whereas in Skype editing is very limited.

I think the time is ripe for me to use the word wave now. Instead of finding ways of describing what Google Wave does. A wave is wave. It’s not email, it’s not instant messaging and its not a document. It is a wave.

Once there are more plugins available that kind of collaboration is really possible in a lot of areas. Working together on code or graphics could be built on the basis of Wave.

Start using it!