Have had an account for awhile but still haven't found any use for it, however if anybody wants I have 20 invites available as well.
So I googled it and i still don't really understand it. Sure it's a new form of email/chat room kinda thing, but what are the invites for? Is it an invite to a little chat room/email convo? Or do you need an invite to start actually using "the wave."
Google wave is still in beta, not that many users so it doesnt stress the system and cause more glitch's. Hence the invite system. Wave is a tool that is like email and chat, we use it in my group projects to write things together, this also demonstrate one of waves coolest features. as you type something, others can read it and edit/insert things. so for example 5 or so of us can edit a paper in real time all seeing the changes as they are being made and not having to "get caught up" with the latest version. at first it takes some getting used to seeing other people type and having someone changing something while your mid paragraph / sentence but you get use to it. We've found it to be a great way to get stuff done and is a very powerful tool.
I think its cool, I just don't think it that its good for work. Basically Google could have access to all of your work information. I guess it depends on how much your company is concerned with confidentiality, I know it would not be OK with my company at all.
I'm not As convinced far as confidentiality goes, knowing that "over 60 percent of Fortune 100 have gone Google and that over 60 percent of U.S. state governments have gone Google" Well I didnt either till I read about it here lol http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/analysis-is-the-world-really-going-google-20091130/ Google in their terms of privacy also talk about this and what they do with your information, its not an interesting read.... lol but something I've looked over. I do think that wave may be hard to use in a large company though. The signal to noise ratio could get a bit high.
Wave is not intended to be only on Google, the idea is that it is a protocol, similar to http. The idea is that they design the protocol and developers can create clients and use it. I would/wouldn't be surprised to see something like this come out in the next MS Office version beyond 2010 (already have 2010, it's not in there...). SO, with that in mind, you could run your own Wave server internal to your network and not ever have to go to the cloud, just like you do an exchange (or other email) server today. Rusty nailed it when he talked about the collaboration abilities. I already have my family and friends on it, and it is much better to plan events or have online discussions within Wave than it is to use email, IM, phone, etc.
Really, the more people you know that are on there, the more useful it will be. The most common complaint I hear is that not enough people are on and it's not as ubiquitous as email and therefore not useful. The easiest solution for that? Get everyone you know on it.
It takes a bit before they send the invite to you, but I sent it a bit ago. My office blocks it too, as if I couldn't use their email solution to disseminate confidential information if I were so inclined... :crazy:
Thanks asujosh1 for pointing out that its a protocall idea and not a program, i was always confused about that. And as for your quote i totally agree, we're the early adopters and its hard to convince people to change their ways/ show them how to use it. Hopefully Wave will catch on like wildfire once google takes it out of beta and or includes it or something like it in the chrome OS. or how about the idea for android support anyone? :biggrin: (wouldn't that be nice.) What are some of the gadgets you use in wave? I havent really experimented with many yet. do you have any recommendations?
I use emoticony and cleantext mostly, but I have also played with the maps gadget, a scrum project management gadget, and a couple of others for project management. Emoticony is just for taking and turning it into , and the cleantext gadget is like a grammar checker. Good for those of us that are not into proper punctuation. As far as I know, there is already a client for it on the iPhone (not very good), I am betting that android will not be far behind. Right now the problems I have experienced are that waves with lots of blips are slow to load and react. Also if you have a lot of images, a wave with few blips will be slow. One cool thing is that when using IM, you often get three conversations going at once and it can be confusing to the extreme. With this and the ability to nest your comments, you can keep the confusion to a minimum. Also, when you send an email, the person you send it to has the ability to forward it on to anyone and potentially modify it without your knowledge. Essentially, you send me an innocuous email, and I can make it look you are a pedophile when I send it on to someone else. In Wave, I know if you have invited anyone to our conversation, and you cannot modify my comments without my knowledge. Building on that, I can then have a private conversation with anyone else on the wave, and that will be held inline with all the other blips so that I will be able to come back and also understand what was going on when I had that conversation. I see this as a HUGELY powerful tool, and the future of forums like this, but they have to get through the performance issues first. When you load a wave, you have to load all of the blips into memory at the same time.
