Last week, Google announced that its real-time collaborative service Google Wave would now be available to all. No more waiting for invites.
The question is: Was anyone really waiting for an invite anymore?
Is Google Wave all that it’s cracked up to be? Is it a productivity “suck” or a productivity enhancer? If you use Google Wave, what do you use it for? Will it replace email? We’d love to hear your feedback on this once highly-touted service.
I couldn’t find a use for it and neither could anyone I know… We’re kind of scratching our heads as to the point.
I personnally received the invite a whiiile ago and since it was a work-in-progresss I didn’t put much interest in it.
Now it’s available to all and… well it feels like I still don’t care much for it.
I think they stole their own thunder and now we still don’t know how really useful and popular this Google wave thing could be…
To be continued….!!
I had a invite and have tried to see if it would really add anything to my online life or productivity and found that there wasn’t much that really interested me. I abandoned using it completely. Maybe, if Google had come up with this two years ago it would be a bigger deal but there are so many other alternatives that this is a case of too little too late.
I used it briefly when it was in beta and found that I didn’t really care for it. The interface annoyed me, live updates were kinda hard to follow, and I missed a few waves from people because the “notify me on new waves” checkbox was off by default for some reason.
If I need to talk to someone, I still usually still opt for instant messaging, email, or face to face where possible.
I got an invite pretty quickly when Wave first was announced, and I can see how it could be helpful for small businesses, but I think Google dropped the ball on this one. It wasn’t useful enough, fast enough, for enough people to really take off. That may change now, but I sort of doubt it.
I’ve been using it for a week or so (after letting it sit in my inbox for months (from the invite I received).
It doesn’t play my recorded message, which sucks, but other than, I’m happy with it, it let’s me screen my calls better and the voice mails go right to my e-mail!
We’re talking about Wave? DUH! I thought we were talking about Google Voice LOL
Ok, so I don’t like Google Wave AT ALL!
But like Google Voice 🙂
I’ve been using it for a few months now and at first used it mostly as e-mail/chat/forum replacement tool with a group of friends. Much quicker and more flexible than a forum, easier to share with a group of people than e-mail or chat.
I’ve also been using it as a note-taking tool and to-do list, things I’d normally send from one e-mail address to another. Now everything in one spot, organized in folders and with tags. And easy to share, for example when you add a new person to a project, share all the waves with notes and/or to-do’s.
The past few weeks I’ve been discovering public waves and am diving into a whole other use. Information sharing and meeting new people with similar interests.
I’ve noticed some people don’t care at all because it is too flexible and can be used for anything you like and other people (like me) love it because it is so flexible and can be used for anyting and everything you like.
We jumped on to google wave really early on, and honestly have forgotten about it very quickly afterwards.
As a technical exercise I appreciate how ridiculously awesome it is, however in practicality i found it to be slightly awkward to use, regularly buggy and without a real defining place in the market.
Collaborative work online can easily be done with a myriad of perfectly viable desktop applications. From skype to skitch, I rarely feel like out online collaborative workflow was ever lacking. I also find these tools more reliable than a browser based experience. Maybe thats just me.
As for replacing email, no.. The expression “if it aint broke, don’t fix it” comes swiftly to mind here. Email is what it is. It serves its purpose in a way globally understood and accepted as a medium of communication.
You’re not going to rock such a foundation without something being severely broken with email. Which at the moment, it’s not. It works.
I applaud google for the attempt, I think its a masterpiece of web technology, but like many others, I don’t see the gap in the market for it. It’s fallen between the cracks into the eternal void of the grey area.
Who knows, might give it a try again in the future, I’m always up for improving workflow, but my initial response is simply: I doubt it.
IMO, the one big mistake Google made when introducing Wave, was not to couple it to GMail accounts.
Frankly, I was ready to switch to the Wave-interface… but when I got my invite, I was left with two different mailboxes/addresses/interfaces…
How unproductive can things get?
I’ve had Google Wave since they released it to us Developers at Google I/O 2009. They gave us 2 sandbox accounts that allowed debugging, etc. When they first announced it and I got my private invite I wasn’t really sure what I would use it for so it just collected dust.
Fast forward to now. I just got back from Google I/O 2010 last week and I must say, Google put Wave to great use. They used it for live notes and questions/suggestions during the sessions. It proved to be very useful in that situation. At this year’s conference I saw a lot of different companies and independent developers using it for some very productive things. At one point right before the conference I also thought about using it for live blogging while I was at the conference, but Google already had that covered. 🙂
With that said, I think it still has some ironing out to do and I personally do find it a little overly cluttered, but I can see it being something used for more productivity and efficiency as long as it’s used right and people understand it. I think it scares a lot of people just because it’s new and the interface isn’t something we would expect to come from Google.
I’m a minimalistic type of guy myself, but I can’t say that it doesn’t have potential because I’d be kidding only myself. 🙂
Just my two cents.
-Silas
Admittedly, I’m not using it to its fullest. Perhaps that’s because I don’t know what its fullest is…
But I do find it useful for collaborative work…especially when working remotely or from home.
I plan weekly podcasts with it with my mates in Ontario, Canada. I use it to communicate with other freelancers and as a method of communicating with other BoD that I sit with for a local non-profit.
I think Ill get my hands on Gina Trapani’s book, The Complete Guide to Google Wave so that I can tap into it further.
I’m not willing to give up on Wave yet, and I highly doubt Google is either. They may have dropped the ball on this one initially, but they seem to bounce back most of the time. I’m banking this will be one of those times.
I’ve found use for it as a discussion and collaboration tool with my housemates in planning our arrangements at home, and it’s also useful as a personal Wiki which is tied to my google account. Perfect!
We have recently started using wave along with taskboardy gadget to handle our scrum meetings across locations.
Here is the link to taskboardy:
http://agilebooknote.blogspot.com/2009/11/taskboardy-available.html