Google Wave - how I use it

This is part two of a short series of essays I am writing on how I have been using Google Wave and my take on the system.
You can find the main article and index to the whole series here.

How I use it

Personally I’ve used it in different contexts and for different purposes (but always for collaboration, i.e. working with other people to achieve a specific goal) and so I am now able to have at least an idea of what does and doesn’t work for me, for example:

• Messaging: For me this does not make any sense. People have “waved” me with the “Hey, you’re on wave too, great, let’s chat!” talk and, quite frankly, it feels like trying to kill a fly with the proverbial canon. You can do it, but you really shouldn’t as it is a waste of effort, resources and just plain silly. There are myriad instant messaging solutions out there and most of them do much better in that field than wave does. It is overkill, it is slow, it is just plain silly;

• Exchanging longer messages: The “Dear Nuno, How have you been? I have been thinking about that party last week and…” kind of messages don’t appeal to me in the least bit either. Do you realize that in a wave (as it stands now, anyway) anyone can edit what anyone else has written? Have you really tried editing long prose on it’s current interface? This is the canonical use case for email, so just use email for that. If it’s not a “living” document, edited by more than one person, then it’s an email, not a wave;

• Instant collaboration over a project: The ephemeral wave. A project comes up, people set up a wave and work on it collaboratively (and yes, they use it as a discussion medium instead of instant messaging in the context of that particular wave), work progresses until the point when the project is over and the wave looses it’s meaning and usefulness. It didn’t coalesce into a document, it was just a kind “white board” for people to work actively on. It has the history of the work done recorded in it, but apart from that it holds no value whatsoever for the future. This is a usage case that has worked quite well for me;

• Planning: Two or more people collaborating on planning something like a trip, a podcast, or anything of the sort. I’ve used it on both the cases mentioned and, as it should be apparent, it is really well suited for that purpose. Even planing something slightly bigger, say the design and implementations of an open software project (I’ve done that too, and still am in fact) becomes very fruitful. All of these activities require a high degree of gardening, though, because otherwise the wave just turns into an unusable mess.

Things I’ve learned that work OK

As with any new tool, especially one that is as complex as this one, it takes time and experience for one to grok it. I’ve been using it for a while and I’ve already uncovered some patterns of usage that seem to crop up in most waves with different users. Here are a few examples:

• Commenting on sections of a document: I sometimes start a wave as an outline of a document I want to collaborate on or maybe as a few paragraphs about the subject under discussion. And what do people do the first time they open the wave? They do what they’ve been doing for years on email: they reply to my ideas either on the top or at the bottom of the wave, usually on a different wavelet, either quoting my own words/section titles or simply by launching into the discussion without even stating what they’re replying to.
  But wave provides a far better way of doing this and after a while (and some experimenting) I find that people usually tend to drift to this way of doing things, which is to comment right there on the wavelet itself, creating a sub-wavelet that can even be collapsed if you just want to read the full text that’s being debated upon on this sub-wavelet. After a few rounds of this the document starts to look cluttered from all the sub-wavelets debating all the little pieces of text and so the need for curating arises. I will, on a later article, make some screenshots illustrating these items;

• Curating the wave (think wiki gardening): When the document starts to look like one huge, chaotic mess (or better yet, before it comes to that) someone usually takes the time to read through the sub-wavelets pertaining to the section they’re most involved in, summarize it, change the “master wavelet” accordingly and then delete all of the sub-wavelets. This is a good thing to happen to a wave and not at all an attack on the sub-wavelet participants, as it ensures that the wave keeps fresh and usable. If the need arises for further discussion on a particular topic, people can just create a sub-wavelet and the cycle begins again. Also the history of what was said where by whom is still all there anyway.

• Mind dumping: When an idea comes to me about a particular project/topic that I have a wave for (you know those “a-ha!” moments you usually have while on the shower or jogging) I usually go to the wave in question as fast as I can and I just write down whatever idea came into me head. This has too benefits for me: 1- I get it out of my head and into a written form. Doing this makes me organize my thoughts enough to write them down and may make some implications or problems immediately apparent; 2- It gives the other people I’, working with (the wave is about collaboration, after all) a chance to immediately start thinking about the issue/idea I’ve just got and I can get feedback really fast. I do this actively on some of the projects I’m waving about with people and it really works.

Google Wave - what it is and isn’t

This is part one of a short series of essays on how I have been using Google Wave and my take on the system.
You can find the main article and index to the whole series here.

What it is

Google Wave is a product from Google which is, at the time of this writing, in a “technology preview” stage (what this means is that it is in a stage before beta, when things are out there for a few people to start using it and help the wave team find and fix the most prominent problems/bugs/misfeatures. It is not —yet— intended for generalized use and people should bear that in mind when using it and trusting their valuable information to it).
It has been touted by many as a “email killer” and an “instant messaging killer” by but I will argue that that is a gross misconception of what wave is and it’s potencial. Sure, it can be used in any of those ways, but as I’ll explain later on, there are nearly no benefits to be gained by doing so and there are some drawbacks to it.

What is is (in my view, at least) is a very powerful and useful collaboration tool and a way of replacing the abusive way in which people in large groups or corporations use email.
The best uses I’ve came upon so far involved things like planning events/trips, doing research on specific topics, producing requirement documents and planing development of software projects and I’ll expand on that on a future article.

What it’s not

Like I said before, people tend to think that once they get into the wave they’ll eventually stop using email and instant messaging as a means of communicating and connecting with other people. I don’t think this will happen —at least not with the current implementation of wave— and I’ll try to explain why.

Not Email

It is not a substitute for email, it is a substitute for the way people (especially in groups/corporations) abuse email.

Most people have been, at one time or another, involved in “the mail thread that never dies”. You know the one I’m talking about, where one person sends an email to a group about some subject that needs to be discussed in order to reach some kind of decision.
That first mail contains maybe a few points that the person considers important enough to be discussed by this group and elicits a few responses. And also, invariably, a forward or two to someone else that one of the recipients thought should be in on it. Now these responses also elicit other responses from the group and soon someone who wants to reply to item a) on the original email has to reply to a dozen mails, all of each talk about that particular item.
As the list of people receiving the email grows, so does the confusion, until it becomes nearly impossible to make head or tail of it. (And don’t even get me started on the subject of top posting in this context…)

If you work at a corporation that’s large enough this is part of your work setting, day in and day out. And then you’re probably also involved in document editing and revising via email. Yes, I’m talking about the “have you read my alterations to section 5.3.7 of the first draft? No not the one Mrs. A altered, I based my alterations on the version Mr. B did his alterations on” nightmare. (Yes, there are ways of alleviating this, but you just know sooner or latter this things will happen.)

And this is the kind of usage that is an abuse on email, but is just a perfect fit for something like wave.
Wave can substitute email as a distributed document editing platform and a fast discussion/brainstorming mechanism, but not as a document distribution/message sending one. Because documents in wave are always living things and you don’t have versions per se, so if you want to send someone “the final version of document X” you’re better off emailing it to them rather than granting them access to the wave that document is being created on (please note that “granting access” to a wave is not something you can do right now, I’ll talk about this in a future article).

Not instant messaging

It is also not a substitute for instant messaging. Even though it does provide a way of chatting in real time, this communication is only effective and useful in the context of the immediate document being collaborated on. Using it to chat up your buddies is not efficient or interesting.

Even in the context of the wave, sometimes things aren’t very easy as far as chatting goes (mostly due to the way the current interface shows other people writing in real time).
On the one hand this interface does give you the ability to use the system on a chat-like way when discussing what it is you’re doing on the document. On the other hand it is a) distracting and b) an open invitation to start answering whatever it is the other people is writing while she is still writing it, which is something we do all the time in real world physical conversations but that doesn’t work so well in written communication because of the lack of all the clues we get from context and body language. We often find ourselves answering a paragraph that the other people is still writing up, only to find that our question is answered a bit later. Oops, wasted effort and unnecessary noise.

Instant messaging is a means of communication that is well established and has been around long enough to be well understood by people. It is very useful and practical and there really is no justification for it to go away and be replaced by something that does a whole lot more and is —therefore— rather unieldy for that purpose.

Not a wiki

Wikis are also tools for collaboration and group editing/creation of documents, but they are very different in that they only allow one person to edit a section of the document at a time (otherwise you get conflicts that need to be resolved by the humans doing the editing), they have explicit versions of each page and they don’t have the fine grained structure that wave does, with the wavelets and blips (something I’ll go deeper into in yet another future article).

One thing that the wave has in common with a wiki is the apparent need for curation or gardening. This is something that seems to crop up in every kind of platform that enables collaborative editing of stuff —people start writing and replying to everything that’s going on in the document and soon enough the side-threads that led up to the “finished” document just become clutter.
Once again a wave, if properly used, makes this gardening far easier to do than on a wiki, as the discussions should be held on wavelets close to the point being discussed and can them be deleted as the “gardener” is refactoring and cleaning-up the document. On a wiki the discussion is (usually) right there on the document, together with the “real” content or else it happens on a side “chat” page, which is a separate entity altogether and forces you to switch between it and the document you’re working on at the time.

All in all, I find the wave much more similar to a wiki than to email, but it is not the same thing at all.

Google Wave - my take on it

This is a short series of essays on how I have been using Google Wave in the few weeks since I’ve got my invite and why I think it is a great tool for collaborating.
This started out as an idea for a single blog post, but as I began outlining it and fleshing out the sections I wanted to write, it soon became too big for a single article and so I decided to split it into a few different ones so as to make each part bite-sized, making the whole thing easier to read and spreading it out over time a bit.

I’ll use this first article to keep track of all the subsequent ones, so as to turn it into a kind of index of the whole series (look for it at the end of this post).

My feeling so far can be summed up in like this: I really like wave!
I’ve been wanting a product like this for a long, long time and I’ve been using things like Google Docs for some of the purposes I now use wave for, but some things have been lacking all along.
I always knew what I wanted out of such a product (I’ve worked on a prototype of a system loosely resembling part of what wave is many years ago, on my last years at university, and I’ve been pinning for something like this to show up ever since then) and now, after using wave for a while, I find that it fulfills my needs quite nicely.

It is still not all there, of course (and I will address this on an upcoming article,) but it is on the right track.

This, then, is why I love Google Wave and why I think it is a product with great, great potential.
In the rest of the series I’ll describe some of my best use cases, interesting ways I found to use it and what I still feel is lacking.

Hope you enjoy it! (And no, at this time I have no invites to hand out, sorry.) :-)

• Part 1 — Google Wave - what it is and isn’t
• Part 2 — Google Wave - how I use it