GoogleWave

Sarah Ison and Emma Illingworth posted recently about the value of GoogleWave, and I got an invite last week – so basically I know very little about it – please correct me when I say something inaccurate. I’m going to firstly outline what I consider to be its drawbacks, and then why I think its a good thing, and why we will end up using it anyway.

If you don’t know what it is, watch the video below.  Essentially its a collaboration and instant messenger tool that also doubles as email.  It is currently in beta testing, and after the initial 100,000 invites Google now strictly limits the number of new users by giving a handful of invites to each user.

Drawbacks:

• No RSS – no way of monitoring when a wave is updated.  Highly annoying.  This presumably will be changed, but untill then it seriously limits its usefulness.
• No status monitoring – who is online?  This is a basic function in nearly all IM systems and it is highly frustrating in Wave not to be able to see who is there.
• At the moment, it is too slow.  This may be due to lack server space allocated by Google for the beta stage, but whatever the reason, an IM/realtime system that takes sometimes up to a minute to update is not working properly.
• Not enough users.  For collaborative things to work, you need to be able to safely assume that whoever you want to work with will be on there.  When this isn’t the case its all a bit vacuous – you end up using it for the sake of using it on the basis that you’ve found someone else you know who has already received an invite. Clearly this problem will be resolved as the project grows, but why are Google limiting the number of invites that users are given?
• If you get invited (is that the right term?) to a wave that is already in full flow, it looks almost commedically complex massively off-putting to people not intimately familiar with the other participants or the system its self.
• Lack of categorisation within waves – would be good to be able to organise the stuff people contribute

Positives:

• It is really fun to use – seeing people edit text as they write is brilliant.
• It is revolutionary.  I have never seen anything like real time communication on this scale before – when it does become adopted on wiki’s and other large scale collaborations, it will be really interesting.
• The potential to adapt and adopt it into other pages and webtools is almost limitless.  There are so many things that it or an imitator will be used in, as to make current tools look almost dead already – blog comments, document collaboration, e-meeting, how-to guides, multiplayer games………..
• Most of the drawbacks can be resolved be if you accept the fact that it is only in beta (or in fact in ‘preview’, a pre-beta testing stage) so most of these problems will be ironed out.

The other central point is that it is a Google product, and when they begin to incorporate it into their other services, I find it hard to accept that it won’t become hugely popular. Their natural inclination towards heuristically brilliant tools means that usability concerns will probably be completely resolved as the product develops. Although I can’t really imagine a revenue stream, I’m sure the bloodsuckers in Google HQ can, meaning that they have every interest in developing the thing.

Librarians are traditionally quick to adopt new technologies and make use of them in their professional lives.  The need for collaborative tools is quite high in libraries because we engage in a fair amount of project work, often have fairly distributed staff and because of the naturally consensual way that libraries operate.  This fact, combined with the fact that librarians need to be able to communicate with their users in engaging ways, means that libraries will no doubt make good use of this tool. 

I have several invites and would prefer to share them with professional contacts, so if you would like to try GoogleWave, then let me know.

Advertisement