GeekApproach

I recently recieved an invitation to join Google Wave, their new online collaboration tool.  Problem is, they didn’t really give me anyone else to Wave to, which is a profoundly depressing feeling.  First off, I’m robert.entenman@googlewave.com if anyone wants to add me as a fellow Wave-r.

But more to the point here, Wave is actually a pretty nifty idea, but I’m not sure how useful it will be outside of the small scale project.  The system allows you to start generating material and inviting collaborators.  The idea is that there is no distinction between what we’re sending out over the Internet be it an email, text, tweet, IM or whatever.  It’s all data that could be combined into one interface.  As you’re typing into the Wave, in real-time your collaborators see the letters appearing in real time in theirs.

One of the coolest things I saw in the launch video was of 19 different people typing in different languages and the text was real-time back-end translated on the fly to my native language on my screen.  Collaboration across many boundaries and borders is very slick stuff!  Images and documents are persistent meaning you can effectively have “Track Changes” on all the time and go infinitely back into the past to see your Wave as it once was.  You can invite folks mid-Wave and depending on your privacy settings, they could be forbidden to see things in the Wave that happened before they were even invited!

And yet, I can’t seem to come up with a single creative instance of this service.  If I worked in an environment where I need to collaborate with others on a document, sure… but most of the time I’m the information holder and I’m creating the documents to send out to the team.  In that regard, I need to hold the keys to the master document, and have no collaborators.

Maybe a school project?  How about a lightweight presentation? Code?  Dunno.  Check it out for yourself here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pgxLaDdQw