Enjablog

Ian and I received our Google Wave invites from Mindless this morning. *So* exciting!!

This morning was a little overwhelming though. And I don’t think it helped that everything was super slow, probably thanks to all the new people signing up today.

I can see great uses for this:

- Academic: Extrapolating from the new site that my online class is being hosted on this year, I think Wave will offer similar benefits in a less formal setting. So, instead of having a site created specifically for a study group within a course, discussion boards that people don’t really use, and 6 weeks of chat dialog piling up… You could create a wave for a lecture or homework assignment and invite your classmates to participate.

For something like a lecture, you could all write notes at the same time, creating a live wiki of sorts. Or you could make it a public wave where people can search for the course number and see what’s out there. It also allows you to play back the creation of that wave, so with a live recording of the lecture (which you could also embed), you could play back the lecture with the concurrent notes.

- Work: It’s much more interactive than having netmeetings where one person hosts on their computer and other people can only watch or tell them what to do over the phone. I think this, if used effectively, could be better than having a bunch of people together in a conference room. Because, still, that’s one person controlling the computer. This would allow simultaneous editing of/collaboration on documents, help keep a running log of discussion/rationale behind decisions, and could serve as its own form of meeting minutes.

- Event Planning: I could see this being integrated with the calendar; people within a wave might decide that they want to meet in person — or, my family might want to plan what time to have lunch on Saturday. After the parties involved decide, they create a calendar event from wave and the event would be linked to the discussion leading up to the decision.

I can definitely think of ways this would’ve been helpful with wedding planning — keeping track of contact info for vendors, lists of things that needed to get done and who would do them/when they were done, designing invitations. And here we were using IM, email, and shared documents like people from 2008. Sigh…

- Group activities: This could be useful for other things, like Fantasy Football leagues, pretty much anything I would use Google Groups (society mailing lists, volunteer groups, etc.) or shared documents for (family shopping lists! which can be conveniently accessed and updated from a phone!), and will pretty handily replace discussion boards.

Depending on how people use this, I could see it overlapping with/replacing twitter. I don’t see it replacing facebook, though there are plenty of articles out there speculating otherwise.