Riding the Wave
By sylvie | November 13, 2009
I just got a Google Wave invite after begging Google for one some weeks ago. Which is ironic, since I already got one a week or so ago from a friend in my guild. I poked at it the first day, decided it looked like I didn’t know anyone else with Wave and left it alone while I waited for the power to invite my colleagues.
Wednesday I thought that I should check Wave to see if I had any invitations so that I could send one to Sarah and found out that a couple of people in my guild have Wave and were messing around with it as an unofficial guild backchannel. So I joined that Wave to see what it looked like.
Notice that I said “a couple of people”. That right there is my main problem with Wave at the moment. It doesn’t take the small expertise I have in groupware to realize that an online collaborative tool will only be useful if everyone you want to collaborate with has access to said tool. So I am unsure why Google is proceeding with this “invitation only” model. I know, I know, they’re probably ironing out bugs before the big rush of people. And if you have invitations, then you should be able to invite your collaborators. However, I haven’t got the ability to invite others yet, so that model is faulty.
So I’ll have to wait a while before I can try Wave out in a real collaborative work scenario.
Oh by the way: there’s a Firefox addon to notify you when a wavelet has been added to your Waves.
Topics: CSCW, Collaboration |
