In a word, yes. I’m sure it seems to some of you that Google’s always got some new “cool” thing, but trust me, you need to check out Google Wave. Google’s latest collaboration tool has lots of really neat ideas, concepts and technology. For those interested in designing next generation collaboration, definitely there are a few inspirational items.
Here’s what I found most interesting:
- It is all about email. The web interface looks just like Outlook except you can invite people to an email thread which displays more like a discussion than an email. This allows you to read all the historical activity rather than just start participating when you were invited in.
- Everything is real time. When one responds to an email wave, you see the characters as they are typed. Kind of like email meets IM, only better.
- Email waves can be made public. They can go to your blog or website to get more people involved in the conversation. This is brilliant – moving a nucleus of conversation from a few participants to many with a click. However, this one might give rise to some privacy issues, but an interesting concept none-the-less.
- Drag and drop from the desktop. As far as I can see this web product has better interoperability with the desktop than email clients have.
At any rate, once again, worth a watch – http://wave.google.com – to think about how email and the web can connect to stimulate and grow small and emergent conversations into something broader and more social.
Thanks for posting that, Eric. I agree, I’m already thinking about many more applications for networked learning we may yet see come out of Google Wave.
For my part, I was really impressed with the possibilities for inter-cultural collaboration that “Rosie” suggests. I wrote a bit about my impressions of Rosie (the language translation ‘bot’) on/about the same time as your post…http://www.businesscasualblog.com/2009/05/google-waves-rosie-new-possibilities-for-online-collaboration-across-languages.html
Best regards,
Mel