I had my first experience with Google Wave today. A colleague and I used it for brainstorming, for which we found it very well suited. Once we’d wrapped up, we migrated what we had to our internal wiki, making it a part of the company’s resources.
The ability to have multiple people simultaneously edit a document — and each see what the other is doing, as they do it — is pretty handy when you’re brainstorming. He was in Virginia, I was in Pennsylvania, but we talked on Skype and edited on the Wave. It was pretty cool. In the past, I’ve done similar sessions where one person was updating a wiki, but of course no one else could see it until the changes were committed. You could set up desktop sharing to let others see, but that’s a pretty heavyweight solution.
I guess in a perfect world, we’d have a wiki engine that could support that level of collaboration. Is that practical? Maybe on a site like Wikipedia, it could get out of hand. Our experience worked great with two people… I wonder how many people can do that before something blows up.
I know there’s been a good deal of chatter about Wave, and I haven’t kept up with it. Anybody else have experiences to share?
December 2nd, 2009 at 5:40 pm
I wish we had another RE colloquium, I think it would be an ideal platform to moderate those discussions. The power of wave would really show when you have 10 people editing and commenting in real time as others speak aloud.
December 2nd, 2009 at 6:02 pm
I’ve edited google docs collaboratively in real-time with other people. Pretty cool.
December 3rd, 2009 at 12:27 am
Myself and 4 other people utilize Wave on a FOSS project. It’s wicked awesome to the many e-mails and wiki edits we did in the past. There will be times that two of us are on at the same time editing the conversation or adding new information or whatever, and it flows smoothly.
So far, I’m impressed. I would love to get this functionality into my everyday work. (Get rid of Outlook. Please!)