A few rambling thoughts about Google Wave…..

…There has been a lot written about Google Wave, and plenty of great videos on all its functions, so I’m not going to go over that again.  Instead I’m going to offer a few thoughts on how useful I think it could be and whether it will take off.

Firstly, the issue of whether it will take off as a service.  Well no-one really knows and only time will tell.  It’s only at the beta stage at the moment and its important that any bugs get ironed out to give a better user experience, but I’m sure that will happen.

A few other issues:

• “See as you type” – anyone you are ‘talking’ to can see what you type, as you type it.  This might be an issue for those who aren’t comfortable typing, make a lot of mistakes, or have a learning difficulty which affects their typing.  When using other collaboration tools they would simply read through a message before they sent it, with this any mistakes will be seen as they are typed.  It also means that if you start writing something as a joke, or maybe an angry response, in the heat of a moment, that will be seen straight away and you can’t change your mind.
• Privacy.  Its very easy to add others to a wave, and that may throw up issues of privacy, if certain sensitive topics are being discussed.  However as long as people are careful about what they discuss this shouldn’t be an issue.  As ever its important to maintain tight control over what you allow to be published online – its very difficult to fully remove it afterwards.  Alongside this there is the issue of who owns the content in a wave – which it seems is yet to be defined.

I think as a collaboration tool, compared to others like Windows Live Messenger, it could be quite useful.  Small companies or project teams could find it useful for discussing project ideas etc.  The playback feature and ability for threads to branch off into separate areas and still stay in one wave could be useful for this.  However it’s easy to see that big waves with lots of contributors could get difficult to follow and keep up with – although this is the same with large conversations on conventional IM services.

All in all, a potentially useful tool.  It remains to be seen whether the different features take off – but once it’s out of Beta and gets a bigger user base it could start to take off.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.