Disruptive Conversations

The Single Biggest Reason Why I Can't Yet REALLY Use Google Wave

2009-11-20T18:12:36-05:00

I'm a big fan of Google Wave. A huge fan in fact. I've written about it, posted a screencast about using it in conference collaboration and have much more about it in my writing queue. I love the promise of the Wave protocol that will allow for distributed/decentralized collaboration that is in line with "The Internet Way". I've been a long-time fan of the XMPP protocol that is underneath it all. There is so much great potential in Wave.

But I can't really use it today.

Not yet, anyway.

It's NOT because of the common sentiment I hear about not having anyone to communicate with on Wave. Between Voxeons trying it out, PR/marketing folks associated with FIR trying it out, and a whole lot of other early adopters I know, there are probably easily 150-200 people that I could use Wave with.

And I very definitely can use Google Wave for PUBLIC Waves like those I described for conferences in my screencast. For public waves, it's great and works well.

But I can't really use it for true collaboration with a team a people - and therefore can't really push Wave to see what it can do.

WHY NOT?

Two simple pictures illustrate the issue:

and:

Figure it out?

Yes, indeed....

THERE IS NO WAY TO REMOVE SOMEONE FROM A WAVE!

Like I alluded to earlier, no big deal for a public wave. Public waves are by definition, well,... public... and so anyone can join in a public wave. And anyone contributing to a public wave should realize that anything they type there is potentially visible to everyone. It is an annoyance that you can't leave a public wave... but that's it.

(Note: the Google Wave team did hear the cries from Wave users and have allowed anyone to remove a bot from a wave. So bots can be kicked out, but not people.)

THE PROBLEM

I'll give you two examples, though, where this is a huge problem.

First, imagine that you are trying to use Google Wave to collaborate on, say, a news release for your company. The content of the wave is confidential. You invite your team into the wave and you all work on the document. Then, because the current Wave user interface is, um, not entirely intuitive, one of your team members accidently adds someone from outside of your company into your confidential wave.

OOPS!

There is no way to boot that person out. In fact, via Playback, he/she can see everything you have ever typed into that wave... every edit... every snarky comment...

All you can do at that point is: 1) appeal to the person's brother/sisterhood as a fellow early-adopter to excuse the problem and try to pretend they don't see everything going on in the wave; and 2) start a brand-new wave (copying content over) that includes just your team and not this person.

Not ideal solutions.

Second, let's say that you are working with a team of people and one of the people decides to leave the team. Maybe they quit or are fired from the company. Maybe they start a competing project. Whatever the case... you don't want them to have access to the Wave any more.

OOPS!

Again, no way you can remove them. The best you can do is go up to the upper right corner of one of the "blips" in your wave and do the "Copy to new wave" command... and then add everyone to this new wave.

I recently had to personally do this for a wave of 25+ people. Not a fun experience, particular because the current Wave UI only seems to let you add one person at a time. So I had to create the new wave and then figure out who all was in the old one and add them one at a time to the new wave. It didn't take a long time... it was really only a few minutes... but it was a pain. And then I had to flip between the old and new waves to be sure I had brought everyone over.

And then, since everyone would still see the old wave in their inbox, I had to change the title of the old wave so that people would not go into that one and would know they could archive it to get it out of their Inbox.

SOLUTIONS?

As The Complete Wave Guide indicates, it's not necessarily an easy problem to solve due to Wave's collaborative nature. Having said that, the problem has been solved in the IM space in places like Skype Group Chats, IRC channels, etc. Now, federation isn't here yet, but Wave's distributed and decentralized architecture could add some interesting syncing challenges to this issue - but yet it still seems to me to be solvable.

As "GeekLad" notes in "5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready, it's an issue of lack of any real kind of "access control". I agree with with GeekLad that something like this kind of system needs to be in place:

Allow the wave creator do add/remove any participant from a wave.
Allow the wave creator to assign/modify the following permissions that can be set at the wave and participant level:
Permission to add bots to the wave.
Permission to invite other participants to the wave.
Permission to remove participants from the wave.
Read-only or read/write access to the wave.
Permission to grant/modify each (or all) permissions for other participants and/or the entire wave.

That's what we need.

Access control and the ability to remove participants from a wave.

Until that time, as much as I dearly want to be using Google Wave for all sorts of collaborative development... I won't... I can't in good conscience do so with private information.

Here's hoping that the Wave team does give us this feature real soon now... until then... I'll keep using it for public waves, and for non-confidential private waves... but I want to use it for so much more...

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Flip Video Cameras with WiFi Might Be Useful for Conference Videopodcasting

2009-11-19T20:31:37-05:00

Intriguing to read today that new Flip video cameras will be coming in 2010 with WiFi support. I don't (yet) own a Flip camera, but I've been watching their evolution, particularly after Cisco acquired the company. I've watched friends use them quite effectively to upload quick video snippets to YouTube and/or their blogs... and sooner or later I know I'll get one. Probably wait for 2010, though, for these WiFi-equipped models...

My particular interest is in being able to shoot quick video interviews at a conference or trade show and then upload them to YouTube directly from the show floor. Sure, you can do this today with a Flip camera by simply plugging it into the USB port on your computer - but you have to open up your computer to do that. That's one more step that gets in the way of rapid posting of videos. As the Mashable article notes, the iPhone 3GS solves this issue by letting up upload video directly over AT&T's network. And for those with a iPhone 3GS that is true (I have a 3G and am too cheap to upgrade), assuming you have decent AT&T coverage wherever the conference is.

A Flip camera with WiFi support, though, could be quite useful at conferences with decent WiFi - which, admittedly can be a challenge. Still there are several that I go to that do have decent video, and when Voxeo has a booth at an event we have our own (secured) WiFi... so I could see it working.

I also could see it working well in an office environment, too, for quick video interviews.

What do you think? Would you buy one with WiFi? If so, where would you use it? Or will you just stick with something like the iPhone 3GS?

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First e-newsletter went out last Friday...

2009-11-09T15:20:13-05:00

As I mentioned previously, I have decided to experiment with an email newsletter. The first version went out last Thursday night, November 5, 2009, at around 11:42pm US Eastern time.

If you signed up to receive it, and haven't seen it yet, you probably should check your spam filters. I can assure you it did go out. :-)

If you didn't sign up, you still can... for a number of reasons I am not creating a web archive (yet, anyway) of these newsletters, so you only get it if you have signed up.

Having fun with it so far... interesting little experiment...

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Die Mauer! Die Mauer ist weg!

2009-11-09T08:28:18-05:00

20 years ago, I was sitting in an apartment in an old farmhouse in Madbury, NH, watching some news footage via a satellite link. I was in my final year at the University of New Hampshire studying for a degree in German language. I watched events unfold in utter astonishment... and then called a friend of mine, Thea, who was working at the UNH library... as I recall, my words were simply this:

Thea... die Mauer! Die Mauer ist weg!

She, also a German student, did not believe me... and this was before ubiquitous Internet access where she could have jumped online to see.

It was true, though, and today Germany - and the world - celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It is, indeed, a momentous day...

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VIDEO: How to use Google Wave for Collaborative Conference Note-taking

2009-11-06T14:01:32-05:00

Over the past two weeks, I've both witnessed and participated in an incredibly powerful way to use Google Wave. The use case is simply this:

collaboratively taking notes at a conference

I saw this first Oct 28-30 at eComm Europe in Amsterdam. Members of the Google Wave team set up some initial waves and showed "live waving" during the actual event. Others then participated in (everyone at eComm was given a Wave account). I joined in asking some questions and participating in the dialog. Although I wasn't there, I wound up learning a lot of what went on there and now there are some great notes people can reference about the sessions. If you have a Wave account, you can see the eComm waves yourself by going to the search box at the top of the center column (where it usually says "in:Inbox") and entering in:

tag:ecomm with:public

Now you will see all the public waves that were created by multiple people during and after the event.

At VoiceCon and Enterprise 2.0 this week in San Francisco, I and a number of others did our own "live waving" and the process was quite powerful in cases where a number of us were collaborating. You can see the waves in Wave by searching on:

tag:voicecon with:public
tag:e2conf with:public

There weren't as many Wave users at the two conferences, so we didn't have quite as many collaborators in some of the public waves - but look at the ones relating to "Google Wave" to see some strong collaboration.

I actually used ScreenFlow on my Macbook Pro to capture one of the editing sessions, because I think you really need to see that in action to fully appreciate what it can do. I'm hoping to edit that and get it up as a screencast soon.

To show how to use Wave in this manner, I created this Emerging Tech Talk screencast based on the eComm public waves:

The Emerging Tech Talk blog post has a few more details about what I showed in the video.

If you use Google Wave in this fashion, please do leave a note letting people know how to find your waves. As we all explore this early preview of Google Wave, it's great to learn from each other.

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Best Twitter Lists ever.... (from Christopher Penn)

2009-11-01T19:30:54-05:00

I love it when people find the humorous side to new features that are getting over-hyped in the social media space right now... from Mr. Penn comes:

http://twitter.com/cspenn/lists

As he noted in a tweet, you do not want to be on them... :-)

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Which is easier to understand? Google Wave or the Swedish Chef?

2009-10-30T09:21:55-04:00

Heh... you just knew it was only a matter of time before the parody sites came out! Kudos to whomever put together:

http://easiertounderstandthanwave.com/

Very cute.

The reality, too, is that Google Wave is hard to understand until you wrap your brain around the not-overly-intuitive user interface. Once you start to get the interface, though, there are some VERY cool things you can do with it... I've got some screencast ideas I hope to be posting soon...

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Heading out to Enterprise 2.0 conf next week in SF...

2009-10-29T17:21:07-04:00

On Sunday evening I'll be heading out to San Francisco were I'll be speaking at both Enterprise 2.0 and VoiceCon next week at the Moscone center (they are co-resident). As I outline on a page on the Voxeo Talks blog, my talks at Enterprise 2.0 will both be on Tuesday, November 3, 2009. The first is:

11:15 am–12:00 pm – Case Studies In Enterprise Micro-Blogging Micro-blogging is taking hold within the Enterprise. The social aspects of real-time messaging promise to improve productivity, knowledge sharing and community-building. Organizations pursuing “Enterprise Twitter” solutions however face numerous issues: *What is the business case (including metrics and ROI)? *What are the policy, security, compliance, and discovery implications? *Are there best practices to help with employee adoption? *What application scenarios work best? e2 Moderator – Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
Speaker – Brad Garland, CEO, The Garland Group
Speaker – Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo Corporation
Speaker – Scott Mark, Enterprise Application Architect, Medtronic
Speaker – Wim Hofland, Manager, Inspiration and Innovation, Sogeti Netherlands

It should be an interesting discussion, particularly because my views on "enterprise micro-blogging" have evolved a good bit (and not necessarily in a positive direction) since I wrote my long piece a year ago about Yammer, Present.ly and Laconica.

Next up, and on the same general theme, is a "reactor panel" that is a bit of reprise of a similar panel at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston earlier this year, although with different participants:

4:15 – 5:00 pm – The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise The rapid rise of social messaging services such as Twitter creates challenges and opportunities for end-user organizations. How can end-user organizations utilize social messaging to improve external and internal collaboration? What’s the role of social messaging in a unified communications and collaboration architecture and how are UC&C vendors incorporating social messaging into their products? How can organizations embrace social messaging in a way that is consistent with needs for security, governance and compliance? Will the rise of public social messaging services render investments in unified communications moot? Join us for a free-wheeling discussion into the all of these topics and more. e2 Moderator – Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
Speaker – Akiba Saeedi, Program Director, Unified Communications and Collaboration, IBM Software Group
Speaker – Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo Corporation
Speaker – David Sacks, CEO, Yammer
Speaker – Eugene Lee, CEO, Socialtext
Speaker – Paul Dunay, Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing, Avaya Inc.
Speaker – Vivek Khuller, President and CEO, Divitas

Again, it should be an enjoyable session... particularly if we get to have a bit more of a discussion.

Both sessions are "slide-less" in that we as participants are not showing slides... just discussing the topic.

On Thursday morning, Irwin Lazar and I also have a "Deep Dive" on "Web 2.0 in the Enterprise", although interestingly that is going on over on the VoiceCon agenda.

Anyway, if you are out at either Enterprise 2.0 or VoiceCon, do drop me a note and perhaps we can connect somewhere out there. You can expect, of course, that I'll be tweeting from the show on probably both @danyork and @voxeo.

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I'm toying with creating an email newsletter - care to sign up?

2009-10-28T22:40:29-04:00

For some time now, I've been playing with the idea of starting an e-mail newsletter. Several reasons... but primarily because I am curious about using it as an adjunct to all the writing I do online. I write across a good number of sites and yet there are common themes that are woven into all my writing - primarily this one:

to try to tell the story of all the changes that are going on all around us in both the way we communicate and also the tools we use to communicate.

That theme is here on Disruptive Conversations, over on Disruptive Telephony, in Blue Box podcasts, in my Emerging Tech Talk video podcasts and definitely also in what I write on Voxeo's blog site. It's also a theme in some of what I post on Facebook and Twitter, too.

I don't know how often I'll send out the newsletter. Knowing me, I expect it will vary in frequency. Right now I'm thinking it will probably include items such as:

Major pieces I've written or produced somewhere in my network of sites that I think would be interesting to a larger audience.
Updates on upcoming conferences where I'll be speaking and where we might be able to meet.
New projects or initiatives - or other bright, shiny objects I'm chasing.
New tools I think people might find useful.
Random personal updates or other notes.

Again, it's still very much in the formative stages (what kind of information would you like to receive?)

It also, quite frankly, gives me a chance to experiment with iContact, a service I've been wanting to try for a while.

Anyway, if you'd like to join me in my little experiment, you're welcome to do so and I'd be honored to have you along for the ride. The shiny new sign-up form is here:

I'll probably be sending out the first newsletter in the next week or so. Being the security/privacy nut that I am, you can be sure I won't sell your name or do anything like that. That's not my style.

If you do sign up, thanks for doing so.

P.S. And yes, because I despise the link-spam bots out there that clog up systems by filling out forms on sites, I do require you to confirm your email address. I know it's one extra step, but really it's better for all involved...

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Experimenting with Google Wave? Here's a great list of keyboard shortcuts

2009-10-28T06:04:16-04:00

Are you experimenting with Google Wave and wish you could work quicker within the Wave windows? If you are like me and love keyboard shortcuts, I found this site that may be of help to you:

http://spreadgooglewave.com/syndication/google-wave-keyboard-shortcuts

The two shortcuts that save me the most time are:

"Shift+Enter" - ends your editing, the equivalent of pressing the "Done" button with the mouse.
"Ctrl+Space" - marks all blips in a Wave as read (important in a wave like the VUC Wave that has lots of commentary).

What Wave keyboard shortcuts do you find most useful?

P.S. If you are on Wave and want to say hello, I'm at "danyorkLPG@googlewave.com".

P.P.S. No, I don't have any more invites. :-)

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R.I.P. GeoCities...

2009-10-26T14:18:15-04:00

As has been widely reported, Yahoo! is shutting down and deleting all the content from its GeoCities service today. This isn't a surprise, as Yahoo! has been laying the groundwork for the shutdown for some time. And in truth, I'll barely mourn the passing... I haven't intentionally been to a GeoCities-hosted site in years.

But...

..."back in the day", as folks are so fond of saying now, GeoCities certainly was a place where many people got their start with free websites. For those of us online in the 1990's... long before all the zillion sites today where you can go and create your own free site... there was GeoCities.

I had websites running on other servers and never set up my own site on GeoCities, but I certainly knew folks who did and undoubtedly spent time on some sites there. It's amazing on one level that the Yahoo! acquisition was ten years ago... but in recent years the service had definitely been eclipsed and for many of us was more almost a caricature than anything else... (see today's XKCD layout to get a sense of what the site had become like).

Still, it's worth noting the passing, because back in the 1990's, GeoCities certainly did help many people get online. Some articles I noticed today:

Mashable: GeoCities Closes Tomorrow: Goodbye, Old Friend
L.A. Times: GeoCities' time has expired, Yahoo closing the site today
Wikipedia entry on GeoCities

And, as I mentioned earlier, the folks at the XKCD comic changed their layout in tribute:

(P.S. A colleague has pointed out that if you view the source of the XKCD page, it's even funnier...)

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Using TypePad Connect now to let you comment with your accts from Twitter, Facebook, OpenID or more

2009-10-23T10:53:50-04:00

Earlier this week I enabled "TypePad Connect" for this blog and my Disruptive Telephony blog so that you can now sign in when commenting using your "identity" from TypePad, Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, or many others. Nicely, you can also, of course, simply enter in your name, URL, etc. like you always could before on this blog. The difference is that now down above the comment field you should see this:

If you click on the "more..." link, you will be taken to a site to choose the account you want to use:

I'm particularly pleased about the ability to support OpenID, something I've written about both here and over on Disruptive Telephony, although that's not particularly surprising given Six Apart's support for OpenID in the past.

There's a larger story to be written here about TypePad Connect and how it is part of the greater battle going on both with regard to your "identity" across blogs and also where your comments are stored. The Read/Write Web had a great article on the topic a year ago when TypePad Connect first came out. For me, since both this blog and DisTel are already hosted on TypePad, the issue about having your comments reside on TypePad's servers is irrelevant, really, since they already are. Another time, though, I'll write more on the larger story.

In the meantime, feel free to leave comments through being logged into those services (and saving yourself filling out the form).

For those wanting to know more about TypePad Connect, there is a video on the main page and also previous TypePad blog posts in November 2008 and January 2009 that go into more detail.

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Congrats to HubSpot on $16M funding AND launch of "Inbound Marketing" book

2009-10-19T16:50:30-04:00

Congratulations are very definitely in order to the folks over at HubSpot today for two reasons:

They closed a $16 million Series C investment round.
They launched their new book: "Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs"

HubSpot has definitely been one of the companies I've been watching in this space. They've provided a great amount of content through their Internet Marketing blog on a wide range of topics. I've also enjoyed some of their "Grader" tools. Plus, on a purely local note, they are an interesting Boston-area company just a couple of hours south of me.

Congrats to Brian Halligan and all the HubSpot team... and best wishes to them as they aim to become "the Salesforce.com of marketing".

P.S. Check out their "Inbound Marketing cartoon eBook".

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Sustaining a launch/campaign - the Attention Wave is just the spark...

2009-10-19T16:09:09-04:00

A few weeks back, Bryan Person replied to my Attention Wave case study with this comment (my emphasis added):

I like the "attention ripples" expression, and it feels like a more sensible way to steadily build awareness and momentum around new products and services. You *can* still drop multiple blog posts, for example, on "launch day," but why not also have an editorial plan to publish content across multiple social channels over several days and weeks?

Absolutely.

The last part is the critical point to me. Packaging your initial content into an "Attention Wave" should just be the spark that ignites your campaign/launch/etc. The goal of that first package of content is to:

tell your story from multiple points-of-view
provide the resources to help others tell your story (ex. provide an embeddable video people can use)
get as much initial visibility as possible

But if there's no plan to continue the content creation, then your nice Attention Wave package of content becomes simply a spark that may light a small fire but soon runs out of fuel.

To Bryan's point, you should have an editorial calendar that continues to build on your launch package and that streams out in the days, weeks and months after your launch. You want to feed fuel to the fire and keep the flames burning.

The Attention Wave is just the spark...

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PodCamp NH coming up on November 7 - 8, 2009 - sign up now!

2009-10-16T16:19:11-04:00

I was delighted to learn recently that PodCamp NH is coming up Saturday and Sunday, November 7 and 8th, 2009, in New Hampton, New Hampshire, near big Lake Winnipesaukee. I've been a huge fan of the PodCamp type of events ever since I attended and spoke at some of the first PodCamp Boston events a few years back... and it's great to see such an event coming to the Granite State. Kudos to Leslie Poston and team for getting it going.

There already are a good number of people indicating that they will attend and the list of sessions looks great so far. (I'm pleased to see that friend Ted Gilchrist is doing a talk on voice mashups!) Following either of those links you can sign up to attend and/or propose a talk - they are also naturally looking for sponsors to help defray the costs.

Sadly, it looks like I'll have to miss this inaugural Podcamp NH. I'll be spending the week prior out in San Francisco speaking at both the VoiceCon and Enterprise 2.0 conferences and then will be heading down to Voxeo's office for the week of November 9th. Since I'd kind of like to see my family in between, well... I'll have to catch the next PodCamp. It's somewhat ironic in that several of the talks I'm giving at both VoiceCon and E2.0, particularly the ~2-hour "Web 2.0 in the enterprise" session I'm doing Wednesday with Irwin Lazar, directly relate to the kinds of things discussed at PodCamp and would be fun to talk about there. Ah, well.... next time.

I look forward to reading about it and I'm definitely glad to see the activity increasing here in the Granite State. Now Podcamp NH just needs a tag line that riffs on our state motto... something like:

Blog Free or Die!

If you are in New Hampshire (or want to travel here), definitely do check out PodCamp NH... attend... present... learn...

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Technorati Tags: podcamp, podcampnh, socialmedia, conferences

What I need is the "Brain-To-Blog" interface!

2009-10-16T15:50:46-04:00

As I see in the Twitter stream, many good friends of mine are attending and speaking at Blog World Expo right now out in Las Vegas. I'm not there, nor was I at last year's BWE, but I was a huge fan of and attendee at the "Podcast and New Media Expos" that proceeded it. There are some REALLY great sessions going on out there right now.

The one thing I don't see being discussed there is this:

I need a Brain -> Blog interface!

I need something that can take all the article ideas in my brain and just mystically make them appear on my various blogs. My problem is not a lack of ideas. No way! I have the opposite problem.

Every day I wake up with my head exploding with stories to be told ... and every night I find myself going to bed with so many of those stories left untold.

I have an article queue miles long... and I find myself thinking through stories at all sorts of times... but finding the time to actually write and post those stories is so incredibly difficult. Between crazy work hours, a family I love to be with (including an extremely cute but demanding 5-month-old) and, well, the need to sleep and eat... the time to convert those articles from thoughts in the brain to words on a blog site seems incredibly hard to get.

I want the interface that's in many cyberpunk/sci-fi stories... where I can just think the text that I want to post and... ta da.. it magically gets created! Sadly, such things are right now only in stories and research labs... but it sure would be nice to have.

Meanwhile, back in the reality of 2009, I guess I'll just have to figure out how to carve out some more time... ;-)

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For Immediate Release episode #490 - co-hosted by yours truly (Dan York)

2009-10-08T19:45:36-04:00

Today I had the fun of filling in for Neville Hobson and joining Shel Holtz as a co-host for For Immediate Release episode #490. Neville was busy in his first week with his new job and so Shel asked me if I was interested in co-hosting. I happened to have a block free in my schedule in the middle of the day so I was glad to join Shel. Long-time readers know that I've been submitting weekly reports into FIR for probably over four years now, so I'm obviously quite familiar with the show, the format, etc.

As you'll hear in the show, Shel and I had quite an enjoyable time covering a wide range of topics about which both of us are passionate. The summary Shel wrote is:

Content summary: Dan York joins Shel as guest co-host while Neville copes with demands during his first week in his new job; our interview with Steve Rubel on lifestreaming and other matters is set for Friday; Dan reports that a lot of good content is coming out of the Inbound Marketing Summit, which is taking place today and Friday; Dan talks about his marketing and communications responsibilities at Voxeo and how he uses the concept he has dubbed “the attention wave”; Sallie Goetsch reports on the death of podcasting; Media Monitoring Minute; News That Fits: the FTC issues rules for affiliate bloggers in the U.S., companies continue to invest in social media but 54% of them block their own employees, a company owns up to unethical behavior, a deep dive into Twitter statistics including the behaviors that promote retweeting; music from Matthew Ebel; and more.

Links to the articles we discussed can be found in the show notes over on The New PR Wiki.

It was quite fun and I thank Shel for asking me. Schedule permitting I'd be glad to do it again sometime.

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Today's launch of Google Wave - some links and initial thoughts

2009-10-01T23:25:13-04:00

Unless you were under a rock, or are not in the tech part of the online world, you knew that yesterday into today was "the big day" when Google Wave launched it's wider public preview. Having had a Wave login since back in July, but not honestly had a whole lot of folks to try it out with, I was pleased to get the invite this morning to join in the public preview. If you are in the world of Wave, I can be found at:

~~danyorkLPG@gmail.com~~ danyorkLPG@googlewave.com

Feel free to invite me to a wave. [UPDATE: It appears that within Wave, you have to use the "@googlewave.com" address.]

LINKS, LINKS AND MORE LINKS...

There were, of course, a zillion stories written over the past couple of days related to Google Wave. Some of the ones I found most useful in understanding the basics:

ReadWriteWeb: 100,000 Google Wave Preview Invites: Everything You Need to Know About Tomorrow's Launch
Lifehacker: Google Wave First Look
Ars TechnicaTurning the tide: a hands-on look at Google's Wave
ReadWriteWeb: Widgets, Robots & Extensions: A Few Things to Try Once You Get Your Google Wave Invite
TechCrunch: Google Wave Starts Rolling, Picks Up Over 100,000 New Riders

Mashable has also had extensive coverage over the past few months, as has RWW in particular.

There were some other posts I found interesting:

LA Times: How Google Wave could transform journalism
Louis Gray: Google Wave Hits Shore. Flash Flood Warning In Effect.
Salesforce.com: Getting in Front of the Wave

The Salesforce.com demo, in particular, was quite compelling and intriguing to see how Google Wave could fit into existing business apps like Salesforce.

With ANY service that was so incredibly hyped as Wave, there was the inevitable backlash... predicted by a TechCrunch article, chronicled by a RWW piece and certainly given the greatest roasting by none other than Robert Scoble himself:

TechCrunch: Google Wave: There Will Be Backlash
ReadWriteWeb: Geeks Try Google Wave, Have Mixed Feelings
Robert Scoble: Google Wave Crashes on Beach of Overhype

Many, many, many more posts out there, naturally, and I'm sure many more will come in the days and weeks ahead as more people try it out. (I would also be remiss if I didn't point out Dion Hinchcliffe's great post from back in May: "The enterprise implications of Google Wave - Definitely worth a read.)

SOME INITIAL THOUGHTS

As I worked with the public preview today, I did have some initial thoughts:

Overall, I definitely LIKE it - Having worked with it for a while, I have to say that the potential for near-real-time collaboration is pretty amazing. It's great to see the ecosystem of applications (gadgets and robots) developing. The preview seems pretty fast and stable. And it's all built on XMPP and other open standards with the promise of a distributed architecture. All in all pretty impressive.
UI takes some getting used to - Having said that, the user interface to Google Wave does take some getting used to. Just the way comments are inserted... it's part IM... part email... part wiki. You might be leaving a comment toward the bottom of a wave when someone else inserts something toward the top. Just takes a bit to understand.
Namespace shared with GMail - This is either a good thing if you have a GMail name you like, or an annoying thing if you were hoping to get a particular name. In my case, I had perhaps naively hoped that maybe I could get "danyork", but since someone else has that for GMail already, I couldn't. So I wound up using my GMail account name. To be honest, it makes sense for Google to do it this way. There will just be namespace collisions for people like me with common names. So it goes.
Yet another place to check for messages - Both Louis Gray and Robert Scoble mentioned this, and I definitely agree... your Google Wave inbox becomes yet another place to check for messages. I already have a work email account, a personal email account (well, several, but all coming into one client), a Skype IM account, a dozen other IM accounts aggregated into Adium... so in addition to checking all of those I need to check my Wave inbox. And because it is web-based I don't have a way in my Mac's Dock area to know there are new messages. Hopefully at some point it will be integrated with GMail or provide some other way to help us with this issue.
Distributed architecture isn't there yet - I realize that this is only a "preview" for 100,000 people, but I'm impatiently interested to see the distributed architecture outlined at Waveprotocol.org. As I recently wrote about at great length, the "Internet Way" is to have distributed, decentralized architectures. Services like email or the web where: 1) anyone can set up their own server; and 2) you don't have to ask anyone for permission to do so. Google Wave holds out the promise of giving us a very rich collaboration infrastructure built on a distributed, decentralized model. I want to get there. Today. :-)

Those were some initial thoughts... I'm sure I'll have more as time goes on and I'll write about them here.

What do you think? If you are in the initial preview pool, what has your experience been?

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Visualizing an "Attention Wave" - What does it look like?

2009-09-29T22:56:34-04:00

What does an "Attention Wave" look like? Building on my last two posts of:

I thought I'd share a quick sketch of one way of visualizing what you are trying to create (click the image for a larger image):

There are undoubtedly other ways you could picture this, but hopefully this provides one view.

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Tomorrow is "Google Wave Day" - some links to learn more...

2009-09-29T20:51:57-04:00

If you're in the tech part of the blogosphere, you are probably aware that tomorrow Google will send out 100,000+ invites to Google Wave. It's a big deal, really, as a larger audience gets a view into what Wave is all about. Thankfully the folks at RWW put together a great post:

100,000 Invites: Everything You Need to Know About Tomorrow's Google Wave Preview Launch

For those wanting the "official" Google perspective, here you go:

Now if only I could remember my %#$#% password to get into my Wave sandbox account, I could find out tomorrow how to get set up in the "real" Google Wave.

I'm looking forward to seeing Wave in action with a larger audience!

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