[LRUG] Googley Wavey Invitey

[Chris Mear]

On 26 Nov 2009, at 10:37, Taryn East wrote:

> OOC  anybody using Wave have opinions on how good/bad it is compared  
> to other collaboration tools (eg basecamp)?

I've had one genuinely productive wave, where a previous sysadmin was  
handing over a site to me. It started as a regular message from him to  
me with some essential information, and while I was replying with some  
questions he happened to log on, and it turned pretty fluidly into a  
useful IM-esque session. And then we edited together a reference sheet  
from all the conversation we'd had.

It helped, I think, that we were both webby techy type people who were  
already interested in Wave and had some idea of how the new paradigm  
(ugh) is supposed to work. In a world were most ordinary people seem  
incapable of replying to emails properly, or even picking the  
appropriate Basecamp message/Facebook thread to reply to, I have a lot  
of trouble seeing how Wave is going to get used effectively. But then  
I trend towards excessive pessimism about the human spirit, so take  
that with a pinch of salt.

I can't see Wave (in its current state) being useful to replace  
organisational-type things Basecamp -- it really is primarily a  
communication medium, with its twin emphases on passing messages back  
and forth, and on live collaborative editing of documents. Trying to  
manage even, say, a to-do list would be like using a wiki page as your  
issue tracker -- you'd have to impose all the structure and operations  
by manual edits.

Having said that, the platform (as opposed to the current  
implementation) seems capable of being extended in the sense that a  
wave is just made up of light(ish) XML documents. For instance,  
there's a 'gadget' (I think that's the term) to add a poll to a wave.  
The current set of votes is recorded in the XML, and there's a custom  
interface that appears in the wave that shows the results and lets you  
cast a vote if you haven't already. The act of voting is recorded as  
just another edit to the document. So it might be possible to build in  
something with more sophisticated structure using a mechanism like that.

Chris