Ask HN: IF you were using Google Wave today, how would you use it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: IF you were using Google Wave today, how would you use it?

7 pointskiriappeee19 comments

I'm writing up a blog post and need some answers from the community as to how people used or thought google wave should be used. I'm not really looking for opinions on what google could have done better. Just want to know how you tried to use it/how you used it/how you would use it if it was still alive and supported today. Feel free to go into specifics (yes I read about the apache movement)

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I used it extensively from the early-invite I got through to when they announced it was being scrapped. It was invaluable to me, and I was really upset that it might be going away (and subsequently am really happy now Apache has taken it up).

I used it daily for work, organising lots of small projects collaboratively with clients.

I used it personally, organising with friends the coming weekends happenings, or brainstorming ideas with them for web projects etc.

I also used it among my family to keep track of various things... errands, ideas, etc.

For a while, it had pretty much replaced 90% of my email usage.

Thanks. Care to elaborate on some of that stuff? Did you upload documents for collaboration? or did you work through google docs and link it into wave conversations?

How did you get your family on board with you to work with wave?

What was your first impression when you came online (and probably just like me) and found no one you could interact with immediately?

I used it in replacement of Google Docs, instead of alongside it. Of course sometimes I had Google Docs I needed to reference, so i'd link them or embed them, but for the most part I did my writing of documents directly into Wave. I work very openly with a team of people, so I liked this due to Waves "better" (in my opinion) methods of collaborative writing. Being able to play-back their edits and changes, etc.

My family are generally pretty geeky, and a few already got invites by applying early. I was also one of the lucky ones who was given a fair few invites (I guess by jumping on board so early?) so I used them for family as my work-mates already had applied themselves. I found that even my non-geeky family picked it up quite quickly. My technically-illiterate brother ("Will my CD work in the 'CD ROM' drive? It doesn't say ROM on my CD") managed to do all the basics, including editing posts, but of course anything beyond adding a post, replying to a post, or editing a post got a bit tricky, and replies would end up all over the place (that WAS a huge issue, getting replies to land in just the right place).

I was pretty much speechless when I found out Google wasn't doing the Gmail thing, and letting us instantly invite anyone we wanted in real-time. Having to send invites, then wait days for them to be activated, meant I spent a LOT of time talking to myself in Blips, just to play with it.

I still stand by Wave being revolutionary, just launched really badly and dropped way too soon. Google has left a lot worse projects linger around for a lot longer.

Wave needs to be a tab in Gmail, like Buzz is. It needs to be "available" to anyone who has a Google account (via invites is fine, to limit it to people who really want to use it at first, but make the invites instant). People need time to get used to it, it's the way humans are with change.

I wanted to use it for group projects at school, as it seemed like a really good combination of IM (interactive and fast) and email (permanent and viewable at any time), integrated with the ability to share documents, etc... It would make that kind of collaboration so much easier, but it never worked out because no one in any of my classes had heard of Google Wave. I did get to use it a little bit at work, and was a little disappointed by it, but I don't think there's a better tool for coordinating a small group.

Thanks.

Follow up question. If someone built an extension for interacting with people outside of the wave say by email (yes what they tried to do away with) or maybe sms, then do you think things would have worked out with the school projects scenario?

Mr-Ray allows users without wave accounts to participate in a wave. It sends changes by mail and gives them a simplified interface to add content: http://wave.to/projects/mr-ray

I doubt it - the benefit comes in the fact that IM's happen in real time but are saved for anyone not online. Forwarding it through SMS and email just wouldn't do, I think. If no one had heard of Google Wave, I think they'd be just as scared to start getting lots of emails 'through' it, and no one would actually use the functionality it offers.

I actually loved google wave. I'm the type of person who works on multiple projects at the same time. So this usually means spending time trawling through my email inbox to find missing emails. wave kept everything from the same project in the same place! I was actually really useful, although people just weren't so in to it because it was over-hyped and took a little bit of time to get used to.

Dave

Thanks Dave.

Following up on that. Did the whole "see your friends type as they go" feature ever really benefit you?

I worked on a UML/Business Process editor for Google Wave. Apart from the tool (http://www.processwave.org/2010/05/processwaveorg-editor.htm...) we used Wave for all kinds of project planning and internal collaboration: Meeting minutes, decision processes, SCRUM diary, travel planning, dividing costs of lunches.

We played with the document sharing feature, but finding Waves worked so badly that we never found what we were looking for. For all kinds of project documentation and notes it rocked though. We all worked in the same room, but our supervisors were a few rooms away and often commented on stuff inside Wave and started discussions (we had inside Wave).

I would use Wave as a more flexible wiki replacement today, focussing on team-internal collaboration and documentation of decisions and technical things.

edit: wrong link

We use it for shared notes in our weekly status conference call. Status was great as you could see team members tweaking descriptions of subproject status where they shared work, etc. A lot faster than seeing the notes later or interrupting for something not worth stopping the speaker to correct.

On the fun side, with another group we use it extensively for D&D discussions where we need in-line comments/party-voting, etc. We take live quest notes together and there's all sorts of data being captured there that would be lost or post-merged later.

As Google has implemented the existing Wave, it's a great multi-person brainstorming and note tool. I really do love it for those and haven't found any alternative that works quite as well... we tried it out on a lark and it just became too useful and natural for all sorts of shared tasks.

thanks for the insight into how you used the real time. And pretty cool way you actually used Wave. just so you know :)

What it was intended for -- to replace email and IM. Problem was that it didn't integrate with existing stuff, the real time typing actually made it unsuitable to replace email since the other side can replay everything, and other people editing your messages = loss of continuity.

we tried a pilot using it as a tool for a 3 person initiative with a fourth checking in occasionally. It was pretty easy to start and seemed useful in the earliest stages of brainstorming and posting things between our regular calls. As the number of attachments and posts increased we experienced speed issues and we gradually started reverting back to email, IM and to a certain degree Dropbox. The final nail in the coffin was the information that Google wasn't going to continue support. But our small team trying it out in pilot mode was already moving away from it.

Its funny how little usability issues can annoy you just enough to give something up, even though you like some of the features.

we used it at my startup for several months to replace email, discussion forums, and wiki-based sharing. i loved it; others found the UI so hard to use (and buggy) that we wound up abandoning it

we never used the document uploads -- they didn't work reliably for everybody at first, so we used dropbox instead. also most people hated the see-as-you-type feature.

thanks,

That brought something that didn't come up so far in the discussion. What sort of bugs did you experience. And what was the most difficult part of the UI?

I would use it for small project documentation and collaboration. It's great for that, and I'd have used it for that a lot more if Google hadn't insisted on keeping the data.

Thank Daniel,

Follow up question. If you have seen the videos of real time editing, do you think working on the entire document's text within the wave would be a good way of making use of wave?

To some degree, yes, but I haven't used it like that.

I think the collaboration indicated in those videos doesn't match up with reality. Who wants to watch while somebody takes meeting notes? A better use is sort of a delayed-simultaneous approach, where the discussion is had over the conference call/Skype and somebody volunteers to be scribe. Everybody can then follow along if they wish while the notes are taken.

But I don't see the real-time hand-off stuff as being very useful, at least not in most of my teams' situations.

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