interesting and good article.

“We are moving from one hype and tool to the next, but still, we do too little to drive the necessary core changes within organizations make it even possible to use tools such as Google Wave.”

Pointing at the contexualisation of those nice new tools – awareness, capability, usability, and purpose.

Greets,

Stefan
(Ex-WM

I understand and share your concerns.

Regarding the hype: we’re talking about a very enthusiastic and innovative community, sometimes fueled by the “imperative of innovation”. So anything new is a candidate for a hype. But you’re right.

Sometimes there’s a big unbalance between the energy devoted to innovation, new tools, new hypes or waves… and the persistence of well known problems. You mention some, for example: the divides on the web.

If this was a perfect market, this would all be great, and only the best tools would survive… LOL

Me, I’m still waiting to the Google video presentation to load till it gets interesting, to see how the wave looks and have an opinion…

I liked this:
“We are moving from one hype and tool to the next, but still, we do too little to drive the necessary core changes within organizations make it even possible to use tools such as Google Wave.”
I know so many orgs whose biggest tech leap was to use a mailing list for internal communication… And they still use it, cause it’s great.

Cheers!

Pablo

only my quick 2 cents without in depth understanding your concerns …

…. wave is different from all the other tools google is providing, since is the first native app built with GWT – Google Web Toolkit … so it is more or less just a showcase what can be done with GWT (gdoc, gcal etc are all just stiched together from products google bought) … so it is very tech centered by definition … since GWT is FOSS it is a big step for this movement having such a great showcase provided by a big player like google; really helps me to convince people / companies using it …

… user experience: i was talking to one of the senior google UX designers, but not in detail about it, but he confirmed that there was a massive User Centered Design approach involved, the target group was just very narrow and tech savvy … nothing bad about that … me myself as a senior java developer would love to have such a real time collab feature built in the tools we have now … coding is very creative and therefore very spontan and what would be more fun than jointly painting a picture in real time together with your friends scattered all over the world? … so things evolve with the possibilities and taking the risk of failing or then actually failing is part of this game …

regarding africa, it is needless to says that citizens there are suffering from a lack of bandwidth … but actually such AJAXed apps as wave reduce the needed throughput but of cause still on a much too high level … so dont waste too much time on thinking about wave in africa … just for now go for SMS based UIs … at least i do that massively now …

so at the very end: please read carefully WHO says WHAT and then it maybe comes out, that you are also part of the people who pushed this hype ))

over and out …

Hope we meet soon again …

Cheers Martin

But I cannot share your enthusiasm and I am quite surprised that you believe a “Wave” will make such a difference. Such a wave can be easily done on a Wiki page, where people share content independent from time and space. Have a look at socialtext.com, which offers even more than a normal Wiki.
I also cannot follow the open protocol enthusiasm, although it is obvious that we move in this direction. What happened for instance with Open Social, which was announced form Google long time ago. Where are all these anticipated easy connections between social networks?
What I saw during the presentation was a undoubtful a great interface with a lot of integration of media and a nice combination of existing tools. I still wonder what is so different about it?
Lastly I disagree that it has such far reaching political or social implications. You can connect with simple mailing lists from the global to the local. Dgroups.org does that for almost a 100k members for years and plain email drive also conversations.

its always good to have some thoughtful thoughts and some critique

We from OneAim.org think a lot about such a new infrastructure for the commited world civil society what Google now did – since 4 years. So we are pleased about Wave, the Open Source server, the protocol, the technology. We will see

As example we have planned the same infrastructure as a base for echo: http://echo-logic.org – the planetary agora.

Now, through Wave we can put echo on the base of Wave. We will develope a global and local and at the same time decentral agora, a planetary digital democracy system.

Try to think beyond the actual wave. Try to think about the new web standards, we talk also together on the SocialCamp in Berlin.

Its a grand opportunity.

And about the scepticism that we all have “to collaborate 24/7″: no one have to collaborate 24/7 Chris and no one can collaborate 24/7 We have also to sleep, to make sport, be with the family and friends.

I think with the real time web more people must learn to let things flow. I think that will be the point. The world is so complexly and we think, that we could control something. But the truth is, that we cant. So its also not a problem to be not 24/7 available.

Maybe i make a Wave for my job and I’m not online with this account in my freetime. Why not? Or like in Skype i say that I’m busy, offline etc, if I dont want, that other people see my status.

This is why I’m in this point not so sceptical. I work, communicate and collaborate in the time i want. And if i want with others to do this in real time on a Wave, i will do. But that means not that all people have to collaborate in the future in real-time Its only a tool and better infrastructure, to do as example good eco-social things in the real world.

And for the society innovation around the Google Wave Federation Protocol in Germany we start:

http://WaveCamp.org

The first “German Wave Camp 2009″.

And additionally we start the international initiative “The Wave Society” to bring interested people together which are interested to use Wave Technology for education, democracy, healthcare, social economy, etc.

The theme network for democracy related things will be WaveDemocracy.org, for education WaveEducation.org als example.

Lets start thinking together to use this technology as the decentral base for more. And if we find problems on the way, we will also find solutions…

All the best,
Ingmar

email: ir(at)oneaim(dot)org

I beleive the wave will add both flexability and integration to all sorts of business communication. So many ways to use it, I have already a list of about 20 waves I will start as soon as it is live. As an sme with global stakeholders, we are ready to implement it as soon as it goes live!