And they just announced at Google I/O that they are open-sourcing their in-browser editor, and (finally) specifying and publishing the client-server protocol.
We usually break up a project into large tasks and make a wave for each task. Various assets for the task are stuffed into the wave and everybody comments or provides info directly into the wave. Usually each task/wave has a few people working on that part of the task, and the rest just go in if they need to.
There's also usually a "Master" wave for meta-discussions and overall project coordination as well as final assembly.
Waves are generally setup with a header "wavelet" we use for channel meta-data/notifications/schedules and such, so they don't get buried down in the wave someplace. Everybody edits those, but in general the agreement is to pretty much just leave the waves you put in as-is and don't mess with anybody else's.
As often as not, if there are just documents, we just make it in google docs and link to the doc in the appropriate wave. We've found that's the best way to handle collaborative document editing. We haven't had a chance to take advantage of the new docs features yet, it probably would have saved us even more time since we had to export out the final document into MS-Word for final editing and insertion of various diagrams and such.
One thing that would be nice, now that we've done a few projects like this, is the ability to hierarchically organize groups of waves. Right now we have to be careful to name the waves well...like "Project 4459:Phase A" or some such and search for them.
It's completely replaced using groups for us and various other collaboration sources, the asset management is just much better since it ties the discussion and assets together. However, it would be nice to just have a list of attached files to scroll through sometimes. On our last project, which lasted about 14 weeks, we got everything done on-time with this, but with far less frustration, less problems with organization of stuff, only a small handful of emails (it would have easily been thousands of emails bouncing back and forth) and really very few face-to-face meetings considering.
By way of comparison, a similar project I worked on resulted in thousands of emails, twice weekly multi-hour in-person meetings, constant phone calls, and when summing up the work a mad dash to find lost project assets.
I felt like I could have done 3 or 4 projects simultaneously like this with all of the saved time instead of just one.
We also set up lots of one-to-one or one-to-few sidebar waves for private discussions.
Basically it's a meta-discussion organizer for artifact production for our projects.
Well you do talk a bit about fights becoming more structured, but I get the impression that you're talking about "emotionally engaged" discussions there.
I tried, however it just meant another thing to have open and to check regularly.
We stick with IRC for conversations and e-mail for the matters that take a little longer to resolve. This suits better because e-mail and IRC are open anyway for customer contact all day long.
We have a distributed team (UK & NZ) so are rarely working at the same hours. Wave is useful for brainstorming complicated processes.
We use one Wave per issue (requirement/feature/etc). The top of the Wave we try to keep current with everything that we have discussed - so the first post in the Wave is sort of like a Wiki, while the rest is the discussion that goes into the creation of that post. This means we can come back at a later date and see how we arrived at the decision(s).
Once we are happy with how the issue has been resolved we then transfer it into JIRA. We could use the JIRA Wave robot but our current approach is fine for now.
We use it as a very simple task tracker. We start a new wave every week, list what we're trying to do, and cross it off as we get it done.
We do have a full Redmine install set up, but there are only two of us, so it tends to be overkill - "multiplayer notepad" is enough for most purposes at the moment.
Finally! I've had a sandbox account for the longest time, but for some reason they wouldn't give me an invite to my main account.
Edit: contact import from mail still seems a bit ropey...)
there's a HN wave if you search for 'news.Ycombinator, which has about 21 people on it. It's been moribund since October but I guess we can start adding to it again...
While it is too early to comment about wave specifically, I wonder how a big company would handle a flop of such a product. A flop being lack of expected level of usage.
I think it could be a fine independent product, but they'll need to be be bit more hands-on and responsive than usual to make it effective.
Biggest problem I see right now: every time you leave a wave and return, the state of the wave is not saved. so if you have selected 'hide inline replies' in order to have a high level view of a wave with multiple sub-threads, the next time you access it all the subthreads are expanded again, and it's not immediately obvious which changes have taken place.
This may be OK for small teams of friends or single-topic discussions, but is severely limiting for hub & spoke discussion models, an area in which it otherwise has great potential.
Also, I'm not too sure about the 'username@googlewave.com'. It seems a little perverse to create a parallel namespace, although perhaps the purpose of this is to avoid a repeat of the buzz launch where people found themselves signed up to something without even knowing what it was.
Used it for some courses during my masters. It was a painful experience. When you get to ~100 entries (simple text), it starts lagging so much, I could type a couple of lines of text, that would slowly get updated for the next minute. You cannot easily save images (preview, right click, save as... works). There's no serious way to print. When you work with others you either start mixing answers and questions with someone editing just below you, or start a new section for everything and allow the wave to explode to >500 entries of silly stuff. "Stuck" statuses still occur (waves that are always read, or always new). And there are loads of other small problems I'll skip here... I really waited for the Wave, but now that it's as reliable as it was in the sandbox, I don't see how it can be useful for me.
I was reading Paul Graham's essay on "essay writing" today, and he mentioned how he lets thoughts flow freely onto the page but occasionally needs to back-track several paragraphs if some thread of the discussion led to a 'dead end.'
It would be a cool experiment for a talented blogger/essayist to compose something in Google Wave and then make the Wave public. We (the readers) could use the playback feature to examine what stuff was cut, what the editing/refinement process was.
Of course the whole point of cutting material is that you don't want the world to see your unfinished work... but on the other hand as a one-off it might garner some more attention/publicity than usual.
> Of course the whole point of cutting material is that you don't want the world to see your unfinished work...
Not always. You might just want to cut something out to enhance the flow of your argument. In movies they often cut scenes out, but put them on the DVD as bonus material.
I am not sure about Wave. I was a beta user, then got accounts for family and friends, but the uptake seems really slow. My enthusiasm level is good, but:
As a practical matter, the only money I have made on Wave was writing one how-to article on Wave Robot development. None of my consulting customers have expressed any interest in custom Wave development.
>> This service is not enabled for mydomain.com. If you believe this is an error, please contact your domain administrator or try again with the following link.
It's on the main Google Apps domain management page, right next to the "Service Settings" header (the header of the sections which has things like mail, calendar, etc.).
