Apache open sourcers welcome Google's unwanted Wave

However, Google definitely messed up the execution of it's release to the general public, it never got any critical mass and the concept was presented in too abstract a way for most people to get it and therefore try to use it, but I can see how a large organisation, such as those discussed above, could pick it up and deploy it internally with success.

We still use Wave for collaborative document editing at our startup, although we clearly need to migrate off ASAP. :-) Wave seems to work best as a small group collaboration tool. It's not so useful for communicating with strangers, or for real-time chatting (the key bindings and performance aren't well-suited to short, real-time messages).

Wave is a great replacement for short-lived wiki pages. You know all those wiki pages that you work on intensely for a while, and which then hang around cluttering up your wiki? Wave is infinitely nicer for that kind of emphemeral, searchable documentation. And you don't have to teach non-techies how to use MediaWiki, which is always a plus in my book.

Oh, and install a Wave notification plugin in your browser. I use "One Number" for Google Chrome, which supports Gmail, Wave, Google Voice and Google Reader.

I always thought that this was the most interesting part of Wave, and the part with the most potential - at its core, it's a system for collaboratively editing documents. I hope we'll see more interesting things built on top of this core now it's open source. I always hated what Google tried to do with it, which is a shame - the tech is really cool.

Forgot whatever you heard about what Wave is supposed to be. It's only a tool for small project collaboration.

Here's our use: a new Wave for anything we need to talk about, which is its own subject (e.g., talking about a specific feature for a project.) In that wave, anybody who wants to say anything just adds more messages. For some things, the topmost Wave contains a "summary" of everything said. For example, we have a "Schedule" Wave where we write our schedule. The top Wave contains the actual schedule and is hand-edited whenever we need, and additional messages are added to discuss anything that needs discussing.

This is great for collaboration. Any time I want to add more information to a subject, I add a message. If there's something I need to edit (a list of clients, etc.), I can edit any Wave I want. It works perfectly with multiple people editing anything they want, even at the same time. It even works for real-time talking, which helps if you happen to be updating the Wave at the same time.

All in all, if you completely forget what Wave was supposed to be and only use it for small-team collaboration, I think it's a great tool.

We'd break each project down into phases (and if necessary subphases) and create a Wave for each phase -- something like "Phase A:Secondary Requirements and Permutations". All of the assets for that phase would end up in the Wave with necessary meta-descriptions/discussions around each asset. As often as not the asset was just attached into the Wave, but we used a fair amount of links to Google Docs. The meta-discussions were usually descriptions of the asset, or directions/side-bar conversations between team members needed for coordination on that asset.

After all the phases were complete, we'd make another wave for final review and synthesis of the phase sub-documents, with sidebar discussions until final deliverable document.

The first Wave coordinated project we actually tried to fall back on Google Groups and email and it just made things messy and didn't really make sense. We bit the bullet on the second project and just did it all in Wave. You know what? The project ended up going stupid fast compared to a Groups/email solution. Instead of masses of junk filling up groups, and thousands of emails clogging up my mailbox (potentially getting lost in the masses of other email I get every day). Plus we got a nice historic record of everything for free. Essentially it took what would have been dozens or hundreds of hours of project coordination time and turned it to 0. It lubricated that aspect of the project coordination so my team could focus on just actually doing the project.

(and also, we used Wave notifiers so we knew when there was an update).

I think that, right there, is why Wave failed. It needs "best practices" to work well.

The tool on its own did not improve productivity. It needed discipline and training to learn how to use the tool, and there was a large gap between what was possible and what was useful or productive. By many people's accounts, once you cross that gap it becomes useful, but for anybody who doesn't self-identify as an early adopter, it's a non-starter.

Compare Wave to email, or to IM. There are people who are good at email and people who are bad at email. There are people who just don't get the medium, and are bad at communicating with it, and who could benefit from learning some email etiquette or best practices. But you know what? Even without being good at email, they can still use email effectively. Even when the medium is not being used to its full potential, it's still more efficient than other media. The same goes for IM.

With Wave, this is not the case. If you throw a bunch of people at Wave, the first thing that comes out is an unstructured, ad-hoc clusterfuck. It doesn't become useful until you standardize a process on what gets its own wave, what info goes where, and so forth. Learning to be productive in the tool is an additional step beyond learning how to use the tool. And whatever you decide, isn't enforced by the tool itself, so if someone doesn't "get it," that can put information in the wrong place or disorganize stuff, and make everything confusing again.

Compare this to email, where there is an existing workflow defined by the Compose, Reply and Send functions. Put the text in the box, other person reads the text, and each email is a line item in Outlook. In short, all the organization that you have to invent in Wave is already present in email, and it's enforced by the tool rather than a gentleman's agreement not to make everything into a clusterfuck.

Wave lets you make your own rules, but it also makes you make your own rules, while email comes with its own set of rules built-in. For some people, being able to make your own rules is useful because email's are sub-optimal, but for the majority of people, email is Good Enough, and the benefit of making your own rules is worth neither the cost of having to invent your own process, or the friction of having to maintain it by fiat.

Do you mean Docs? It's there.