Google Wave: Is it useful, or just cool?

At Gilbane's 2009 Content Management conference in Boston last week, a funny thing happened prior to the beginning of a session on Google Wave. The moderator, Gilbane's Larry Hawes, asked the attendees to raise their hands if they currently had access to Google Wave; about half of the attendees raised their hands. Hawes then said he had several extra Google Wave invites which he would be happy to share: *Crickets*.

Why were some members of the audience wary of commiting to yet another tool? A debate is still underway about how the product will impact the way workers collaborate. When Wave was first introduced everyone was extremely intrigued, said Hawes. "I think for some of us our expectations have changed." He mentioned the fear that Wave will be something like Lotus Notes: A program that workers don't know how to use, which causes more confusion than collaboration.

But Dan Keldsen of Information Architected is convinced that Wave is the next generation of portals and content management systems. John Blossom, president of Shore Communications Inc. agreed, saying, "Enterprise was thought about from day one, and the idea that you could have collaborative groups across companies was thought about from day one."

Ian Truscott, VP of WCM Product Strategy at Alterian put the program to work as soon as he got his invitation. He had his team get on Google Wave at the same time and try to create a blog post in an hour with no rules. All communication was done through messaging on Wave (you can view these posts on persuasivecontent.com). Because Wave is in real-time, Truscott's team could see how other people wrote and how fully formed (or not fully formed) their sentences were as they wrote the blog post. People would even edit a member's sentence before it was completed.

"At the end it's a great experience but you can't publish it," Truscott complained. He had to post the exercise on another website. The activity is still in Wave as well. "It's still alive and changing and it's more like graffiti than anything. It's incoherent," he said.

"I think we're using Google Wave because we're geeks but there are lots of other tools we could have used...It's cool but what the hell are we going to use it for?"

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