Pete Williams and I hosted the first Melbourne Google Wave Meetup last week at the Deloitte Digital offices, with help from Merric Reese and David Warwick. It was great to get 80 people in a room to share stories of what everyone has been using Wave for and also what will be possible in the future. Doctor Wave joined us and explained what direction Google is taking the product and how he has seen people using it for so far.
For those who haven’t had a chance to explore Google Wave yet, have a look at this two minute video explanation and my notes on what makes it so interesting.
Watch the Meetup video here (thanks Steve Hopkins for filming). During the session we had a live demo wave, and I have included my highlights below:
Examples and usage cases
How we integrate Google Wave documents with the Deloitte Innovation Academy at our weekly Innovation Councils at Deloitte Australia. (Qik Video)
There is a wave robot to help you manage your references in research work.
Wave concepts could be applied to bushfires and other emergency situations where realtime information flow and self-organising collaboration is vital. (Qik Video)
Of course there are also some funny examples, such as the Declaration of Independence Wave and Pulp Fiction Wave.
Doctor Wave refers to Wave as a document collaboration tool, not a social network. I have personally also been asked a few times if this replaces Yammer (where Deloitte also has a very active network (link)) and I suggest that they occupy very different spaces – Yammer and Twitter is messaging, while Wave is document collaboration. Email will be around for a long time still too, as another messaging system.
Gadgets (widgets that can be embedded in a wave) let us move beyond rich text to other formats, like drawing illustrations together (Doctor Wave should keep his day job!), and the Yes/No/Maybe poll.
Lots can happen when you leave your laptop for a few minutes! Doctor Wave was doing a demo and suggested drinks at a local pub (using the map).. when he returned half an hour later he found that his team had expanded the discussion, invited others, voted on a time and date, and plotted what was now a pub-crawl on the map!
Robots have the ability to act on a Wave with the same access as a person. Rosie is a realtime language translation robot. There is a book company who have set up a robot so that when you type in a book title it returns the current stock levels instantly.
Tim says that RFID chips now have the capacity to store a URL, and that with companies like Amazon planning to have an RFID chip in every product in 5 years time there is a lot of potential to use wave as the communications backend for those applications.
Jason Smale asked about Microsoft Exchange integration or migration. Doctor Wave shared that they put two man years of development time into an email integration but couldn’t create something that was practical. Notifications are difficult but a big challenge they are working on. Pieter Peach mentioned that there is already a robot to add email notifications when a wave changes but that it can be quite overwhelming depending on the activity of the waves that you subscribe to.
Steve Hopkins mentioned that during the recent Trampoline event there were quite a lot of people taking live notes on the public wave. He is thinking about how they can build on this idea for the ADC’s 2010 Future Summit.
Ari mentioned the ‘garden variety accountant’ and how something as simple as being able to collaborate in realtime could totally transform the way people work.
Harriet Wakelam related the concept to education and the idea that a lecture theatre full of students on a shared wave will transform the way lecturers deliver a course.
Peter Spence related it to high-end sports coaching where the coach is often physically remote from the player and needs to show them data to analyse their performance.
Michael Specht reports that recruiters are already using the platform to mine data on people. Doctor Wave responded that there will soon be features where only people you trust can add you to a wave, while everyone else goes to a ‘requests’ folder.
Platform insights
Wave experience comes first, integration later. Two person-years worth of work went into making Google Wave work with an email gateway.
Wave is a protocol, and Google Wave is one implementation of that. Because it is an open protocol anybody can build their own clients to access it – just as you can use thousands of different programs to access your email.
Deloitte Australia currently has the most active Google Apps Wave domain in the world.
Some very interesting wave etiquette is forming as people adapt to the system and create social boundaries. These include asking if people are okay with adding new participants to a wave, adding tags to indicate if you don’t mind people edit your wave, and of course it is considered very rude to edit a person’s sentence as they are still writing it!
You can open multiple wave windows in the same screen by clicking on a wave while holding cmd/ctrl.
Doctor Wave says there is no trademark on the word ‘Wave’ however there are policies on logo use and anything implying Google endorsement. Doctor Wave says there is a page full of lawyer-speak that people can refer to on their website somewhere that also covers usage of the logo.
There are a lot of aspects of Google Wave that are not ideal right now. They’re working on it. That’s why it is called a Preview edition!
Federated servers will allow organisations to run their own wave servers behind their firewalls. Similar to the way email works, this means that if you are having a wave with people within your company the data never leaves your equipment, but if you add somebody external the data is then obviously sent to them as well (just like it is right now with email). These servers aren’t available yet but they are certainly a priority for Google.
Every wave ‘blip’ (message) is digitally signed so that nobody can spoof messages. Damian Miller, the security expert from the wave team explained this in more detail – if you want the technical details you’ll have to find him in the video! One important enterprise distinction was that not everything necessarily needs to be hosted in the cloud (or on a local federated server), there is definitely capacity to create a blended solution.
The next Melbourne Google Wave Meetup
We are planning to run another Meetup in February – if you want to leave a comment below or email me onrhill@deloitte.com.au I can let you know when we have the details. Make sure you also follow @MelbWave on Twitter for updates and track the #melbwave hashtag for the community messages (maintained by @drwarwick).
By Ross Hill - December 10th, 2009 at 12:54pm with 903 views - deloitte doctor wave google google wave peter williams pieter peach steve hopkins trampoline
