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Collaborative Document Creation

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This is a bit of a different post, it was created collaboratively with Nicholas Rayner (@aussienick) using 4 different online collaboration tools to see if we could find which is the best collaboration tool for document creation. Nicholas is a bit of a Microsoft fan and I’m very much a Google fan so we both came into this process with a bit of our own biases. So we tried two Google products and two Microsoft Products:

  • Office Web Apps Online Editing
  • Word 2010 with the document saved on Office Web Apps
  • Google Docs
  • Google Wave (just because of my previous post saying how good Google Wave was now).

In each product we created the document, shared it, and edited the section about the experiences working with that product. Each section has then been copied and pasted into this post.

Here  is Nicholas’ version of the post.

Word Web App with the file shared on Skydrive.

How it works

  • Create the document from within Office Web Apps (http://office.live.com) or create it in Word and save it to the Web.
  • Open with the Word Web App and start typing.

Pros

  • Slick Word-like interface.
  • Nice editing environment.

Cons

  • A bit fiddly to set up and share the document.
  • Not actually live collaboration,  you get an error message that there is someone editing the document if you try to open it.
  • Limited features of Word – eg no Find and Replace.
  • Only works in IE (we tried it in Chrome and it works to edit, but then you don’t have the seamless switch to editing in Word).

End Result

  • Gave up on it as we are looking for a true collaborative authoring experience. It’s not collaboration, it’s document sharing, which it does well.

Word 2010 with document saved on Skydrive.

How it works

  • Create a new document and save it to  the web. (There is a save to web option in the save menu).
  • Share the document with the other user – you can do this from within office.live.com or when you are saving it from within word.
  • Start typing just like any other Office document.
  • You will see when the other person comes on line to start editing the document – it pops up at the bottom of the screen.
  • You will see the paragraphs that the other person is editing – those paragraphs are then locked to you for editing, and it tells you a nice message that you should wait for the other person to finish editing this paragraph.
  • Everytime you save, the other user gets notified that they can refresh that paragraph to see the changes you have made.
  • When both people save, the document gets updated in both places.

Pros

  • Seems to work well after we got the sharing and document open in outlook.
  • Cool popup down the bottom of the screen showing who is editing and gives their live messenger status so you can chat to them whilst editing.
  • You can see that the other person has locked the paragraph that they are editing.
  • NR: Made by Microsoft, everything they make is Awesome! JM: HEY, there will be NO ZEALOTRY HERE!
  • Full Word functionality.
  • It’s free!
  • Familiar Ribbon interface in Browser.

Cons

  • Requires Office 2010.
  • No Live Collaboration from Web Browser.
  • Can be slow in creating and accessing files through a Web Browser (probably due to being in Beta).

End Result

JM: I’m quite impressed with it. It works well. It does what they say it does. It’s free and it’s quite useable. I would use it again, no questions asked.

NR: Very impressive for a beta of a version 1 product from Microsoft. Really impressed with the Live Collaboration when editing in a client, just like with Office Web Apps for SharePoint but this is FREE and available now at office.live.com!

Google Docs

How it works

  • Go to google docs – http://docs.google.com or from the documents link in Gmail.
  • Create a new document.
  • Share it with another user – either enter an email address or choose from your Contact List.
  • They open the document and start typing.
  • You will be notified in the top right hand corner that they are editing the document too.
  • After a bit you will automatically see the changes the other person has done, right in your document.

Pros

  • Linked to your Google Account to easily share with contacts and integrate with GMail etc.
  • Nice environment to work in for straight text editing, eg for a draft document.
  • It won’t tell you where the other person is editing, but it will tell you there are conflicts and will let you copy your text if it won’t save it due to a conflict.

Cons

  • NR: Formatting is..well..crap.
  • JM: Formatting documents in Google docs is difficult as it is missing all the quick and easy shortcut keys for headings, bullets etc.
  • NR: Slow in syncing changes between the two users.
  • NR: No inline spell checker – JM: It works in Chrome – sort of – it only highlights that the word is misspelt, it won’t actually allow you to correct the spelling by right clicking on the word, so it is kinda annoying, If you want the word suggestion you have to use the spell check feature in the toolbar.
  • There is a really really cool chat feature inside the document if you are doing a Google Spreadsheet or Presentation, but it is completely missing when doing a document. This feature is sorely missing from this collaboration experience.
  • UPDATE 14/7/10: Not sure if we completely missed this, or it’s new today, but the chat panel and an indicator showing where the other user is typing is now showing up in Google Docs. It makes it a much better collaborative editing environment.

End Result

NR: Google Docs is good for basic document authoring and editing, the formatting has some issues, but overall it is a good product. I’d like to see the chat feature from the spreadsheet and presentation tools added to the Document authoring tool.

JM: I love Google Docs for quickly whipping up a new document, but for anything that requires formatting or printing, I will always go to back to Word or Excel.

Google Wave

How it works

  • Open up Google Wave.
  • Create a New Wave.
  • Add a person to collaborate with.
  • Start Typing.
  • When the other person starts typing, you will see exactly where they are typing and what they are typing letter by letter.
  • The name user who is typing is shown on the other user’s screen right where they are typing and you see the changes they make to the wave letter by letter.

Pros

  • Great collaborative editing experience.
  • Simple and easy to start and collaborate.
  • Can export to Google Docs when done by using the Ferry extension.
  • As well as typing the document, you can have a discussion below or even within the – eg chatting over the particular wording of one sentence.
  • Good Spell Check in both Chrome and Firefox.

Cons

  • Can get a little crowded and mixed up if you are typing in the same sentence or the same word as the other person.
  • Formatting still an issue – similar formatting issues to Google Docs and no keyboard shortcuts for headings and bullets.
  • Does not work in IE (but will in IE9).

End Result

  • JM: I actually like this better than google docs for simple text editing and thinking up an idea – but I would still go back to Word for final editing.
  • NR: I too prefer this over Google Docs. This would be great for small project teams and a group of people collaborating over a range of different things. I’ll definitely be using Google Wave going forward!

Conclusion

Well I was kind of surprised at what a good experience using Word 2010 was in a collaborative editing experience. If I was working on a proper document where the end result was a PDF or printed document, I would not hesitate to use Word for collaboration.

Even though I love Google Docs, after using Word, I wish it was a little better and had the visual indicator of where people are working. The chat window, which works great in a Google spreadsheet, is also sorely missing in Google Docs. So right now, for quick collaborative editing I would go with Wave, it is such a good collaborative experience for quick drafts or documents that will continue to exist in Wave.

Well done to Microsoft for producing such a great collaborative editing experience, and particularly that it is free and easy enough for anyone with Office 2010 and a live account to access. I recommend you give Word 2010 and / or Google Wave a go the next time you need to work together with one or more people on a document.

Google Wave – One Year On

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After Google Wave was released, I really wanted to wait a while until the hype settled down and the non believers had a quick look at it, didn’t get it, and then left. Now, one year after the launch of Google Wave, I’m having another look at Wave because I’m at the Google Wave DevFest is on in Sydney this week.
First impressions are great. The UI is now familiar, and buttons work when you click on them (There are still some strange UI things like the strange little scroll bars). Searches and folders works, contacts works well. All these are a great improvement from first trying Wave at the first Google Dev Day in Aus a few weeks after it was launched. See http://wave.google.com/about.html for a bit of an overview of Wave now.

Other great new features are:

  • Email notifications, so you know when a wave is updated.
  • Templates – Start a wave with some content – great idea, but you can’t build your own templates just yet – hopefully this is coming soon.
  • Remove participant from the wave – removed people get access to everything they had up until they were removed from the wave – excellent!
  • Add participant by Email – reduces the barrier to getting new people onto the wave.
  • The wave now tells you how many unread blips there are in the Wave and it will step you through each of the blips so you can see exactly how the conversation has unfolded – fantastic! It means you can just drop in and out of the Wave and still keep up with what is happening.
  • Private Replies
  • Link to individual Blips
  • Copy to new Wave
  • Mark a Wave as Spam.

The Gadgets and Robots are collectively known as Extensions. The ones that are available now a great, and there is now an extensions gallery to easily discover the new extensions right from within wave. And you can either install the extension or “Try it Now”, which is great. – there are so many that are very useful. Some of the great ones are:

  • MindMaps – MindWave by ConceptDraw or Mindmeister
  • BrainStormer
  • Shopping List – a fully collaborative shopping list – now if only it was mobile (currently you have to print it to take it shopping).
  • Tasky – Task List
  • Diagram Editor – create UML diagrams
  • Ferry – Export Waves to Google Docs or other formats
  • WaveTube – who is watching the YouTube video – great for training – knowing people that are watching, or watching and discussing together.
  • Unawave for Project Management – create a group, create a project, and track tasks and milestones and other deliverables for the project. Realtime status reportsee http://www.unawave.com/
Some other cool things about the API’s:
  • Robots can be anywhere now. They don’t have to be hosted in Google App Engine.
  • Wave Data API’s – Read or Write on behalf of a user – many ideas forming there.
  • Attachment and Media API’s – read and write attachments – again lots of ideas there.
  • There has been a new release of the Robots API which means that they can be more useful. Not only can they respond to user actions, but they can now update the wave on their own – cool!
  • Embed’s are now public – Everyone can see them (if you want). You don’t have to be logged in to Wave to see the wave – this is a huge opportunity to get your Wave’s out into the wild. Also, embed the wave in multiple places. Imagine this for live blogging an event – not just one person, but multiple people updating the wave live (and then play that back later with the video or slides – wow!).
One cool thing is that Wave is now integrated with Google Apps (GAFYD) accounts. By the end of the year when the other services like Picassa are enabled on GAFYD, I think it will be time for me to move over to using my GAFYD account as my primary account (I still use Gmail at the moment).

Wave almost works on my Android phone but is not quite there yet. There is no iPhone app (you can use it in mobile safari), but there are some people working on WaveLite which will help Wave’s look and perform better in a mobile web browser. Wave still does not work in IE without ChromeFrame. (Will IE 9 change this? I hope).

There was a great talk about Wave for the Enterprise (Slides Here). The talk had some great ideas and examples for the use of Wave in the Enterprise. Here are just a few of the points:

  • Wave is equal parts document and conversation – so that’s why it is a difficult paradigm shift for most people. And why the Wave author needs to set some rules or guidelines on how to structure the Wave.
  • Using Wave, people feel like they are actually working together. Multiple people can be “speaking” at the same time
  • Wave works best for a combination of structured and unstructured processes – semi-structured. Some structured / automated process, and then conversation around that, eg Notation of the exceptions.
  • An idea is to generate reporting waves that people can analyse and notate. A combination of people and robots working together on the process.
  • Automating the Wave (eg a robot that links back to the data on the intranet or other LOB systems).
  • Waves that act as an index to other Waves… (Like the DevFest Wave for this event http://bit.ly/devfestau-wave – just a simple way to get some order into your Waves).

Overall, I do really think that Wave has come into it’s own and is now ready for prime time collaborations, within the enterprise, or for organising a community group, or just arranging dinner with friends.

The Wave is Coming

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Yes Google Wave will be realeased to 100,000 or so people this week (30th September). I can’t wait to try it out for real and see what new features they now have since the Wave Sandbox was launched a few months ago. And I can’t wait to have more integtration with my regular Gmail account and many more people to interact with on Google Wave. I will post more about my thoughts about the release after it happens.

BarCampSydney5 on this Saturday

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For the past few weeks I have been keeping busy helping to un-organise BarCampSydney5

BarCamp is an ad-hoc unconference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment”. BarCamp is an intense community event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees. Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to participate. The BarCamp motto is: No spectators, only participants.

I’m really excited about this BarCamp as we have over 170 people registered to attend, lots of great sponsors and a great new venue.

My talk will be on my topic of interest at the moment – Google Wave, plus there will be a few others wanting to talk about Google Wave so I’m hoping to get them all together and do a super session.

For more info on BarCampSydney5 see www.barcampsydney.org or search twitter for #bcs5.

Google Wave First Impressions

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So Friday was the Google Wave Developer Day in Sydney or #wavedaysyd.

What a great day! Thanks to @pamelafox for organising and for all the Google Wave team being there. It was like we had our own I/O Keynote in the room.

So I now have my Google Wave Sandbox account, and a new appreciation for developers, since trying my hand at downloading eclipse and setting up the basic wave demo was a complete failure (hopefully it had something to do with Win 7 or my eee pc and I can try it again on my desktop).

So, I was going to do the Part 2 of my Google Wave for Project Collaboration post after the WaveDay, but Wave is not quite ready yet to see exactly where it will be heading as a really solid piece of enterprise software, so I’m going to hold off on that one for now.

For now, I will just go through some of my first impressions of Google Wave. Overall it did live up to my expectations as a concept. It’s just in very early development stage at the moment, but you can see where it is possibly heading.

Look and feel

The main panel of waves is a bit crowded and it really needs a big screen to give it room to look good. You can hide the panels as you need to which helps for productivity.

Flakyness

Yes, it’s a bit flaky at the moment. It’s got a lovely feature called Dr. Wave that pops up when it’s about to die, and a cool error message if the wave itself is getting a bit flaky. If it’s going to be flaky it may as well have some fun doing so.

Seeing other people type

This was really cool – I didn’t think it would be. Seeing someone start to answer your question before you have even finished typing it, because they have go the gist of the message was really great. I think this will be one that takes just a little bit of time to get used to, but within a short time normal IM conversations will be very boring.

Missing things

There are a few missing things to the UI right now like folders, saved searches, draft editing mode, different views on the wave, spam etc, and the Mute function and archive functions are a bit hit and miss but you can see that it is coming at least.

Shift+Enter

You need to either click on Done or press shift+enter when you are done writing a blip… in a fast moving wave this can be a bit annoying. I would love a setting to have enter as done.

Deleting

It’s also annoying that you can’t easily delete a blip. If you start a blip in the wrong place you can’t just do Esc to undo it, you actually have to go to the menu and choose delete… it would be good to just be able to undo what you are typing (even though people may have already seen it as you type).

Reading Blips

In a fast moving wave, it is quite hard to follow where the updates are happening… I think some more work needs to happen on seeing the updates – like a keystroke (eg j, k like gmail and greader) to quickly go to the next unread blip. Plus the blips currently need to be clicked on or you need to click on the Read button to mark as read. A scroll past and mark as read feature like greader would be good.

Indenting

The indenting of the blips can get a bit unwieldy, but it wasn’t till the end of the day that we found out we could do shift+enter to create a new blip at the bottom of the wave… I think if we all knew that little gem of a tip, it would have been a lot easier.

Wave Etiquette

This one is going to take a while to get used to. Whether to reply, or to edit, and where to reply in the wave is all a bit confusing. It helps if someone states up front in the Wave header as to what they expect. It determines if the wave is a document type wave, a wiki type wave or an IM conversation type wave… and just as in email the same rules such as not using the same wave thread for other topics or not cc’ing in other people all need to be worked out by the wave participants.

@replies

There is no @reply feature to show you that someone has specifically replied to you. This could be just an etiquette thing (ie typing the @ symbol or similar) but it also needs a way to alert you that someone has replied to you.

User Names

It’s a bit of a pain at the moment that the system won’t autocomplete or recognise names from part of the name, so you have to type in the full name (eg jodiem@wavesandbox.com) when you are adding someone new (after that it is just drag and drop to communicate with them), and if you make a mistake, at the moment you can’t delete contacts.

Photo Management

This is where I was hoping for a lot and there is not a lot there – just yet… but I can see the possibilities and we may one day get to a level of photo management that I described in my previous post. At the moment you can’t select single or multiple photos and copy them into a new wave – you can only copy all of the photos in a blip to a new wave (you can then delete them but it’s tedious and if there are photos in multiple blips it doesn’t really work at all).  There is a great slideshow viewer but again you can either see all photos in the wave or just one… not the ones you want. Drag and drop to upload did not work for me, but apparently I need a newer version of chrome to do it.

Bots and Gadgets

There were some really really fantastic bots and gadgets developed on Friday and I can’t wait for some of them to be essential bots that we have to have in every day use of Wave. There is a small limitation at the moment that makes it difficult for gadgets to be useful, in that they can’t interact with the wave – eg a Gadget can’t create or edit text on the wave, only a bot can. So my idea of a form filling gadget that displays XML data on the wave is well off into the future.


So overall Wave is the start of something very new, and something that I’m so exited to be using, even in it’s current, flaky state. And I’m off to play another game of Hangman with a bot made by @mrspeaker.

Google Wave for Project Collaboration – Part 1

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Tomorrow, I’m going to the Google Wave Developer Day in Sydney (#wavedaysyd). I’m really looking forward to finding out what ideas developers have for Wave. I’m not a developer but I do have some ideas as to what I want it to do, hence this post. This post is Part 1 and I will follow up with a part 2 after the event.

I was completely blown away when I first saw the video of Google Wave, because I immediately thought how good it would be for project collaboration. My background is in construction so I am specifically referring to construction project collaboration, but due to the intricacies of construction project collaboration, the features can be used for any type of project.

Since my initial wave (pardon the pun) of enthusiasm, I have put up a post of some of the things that Google Wave must have before I think it can be really useful. See the post here.

If you need a refresher on Google Wave terminology you can see this article or this post.

Email vs Wave

One of the very interesting points about Wave is that it’s not like email – the wave does not go anywhere (unless it’s going off to a federated wave server… but we will talk about that later), it just sits in the same place it was created. The users log into the wave server to see the wave… all the participants on the wave log in and see the same wave. This is not anything new. In fact, it is how a number of construction collaboration products work already (Aconex, ProjectCentre and Keystone are three that I know work this way). This works really well because there is no way for the message to get lost in transit, so it builds trust in the system and the knowledge that if a person has been added to the message, it is a guarantee (almost, apart from some small limitations – eg you spelt the name wrong) that that person can see the message. So it is really good to see this feature come to our regular communications.

Meetings

The Wiki-like features of Wave will enable meetings to be planned and recorded quickly and easily, with the Agenda, scheduling, attendees and minutes all in the one wave. Imagine if the notes of the meeting were recorded as blips as they were happening in real life, the playback feature of the wave will be a great record of what happened in the meeting… Imagine several people in the meeting all writing blips as they pick up something of interest in the meeting. With a tablet PC this could even be a direct handwritten blip.

But what if we took that further – what about recording the audio or even video of the meeting and time syncing the notes with the recordings (Wave does not do this yet, but the possibilities are endless). The possibilities for embedding the live video (eg something like tokbox) of all the participants, whether physically in attendance, or virtually, would be amazing.

Quick Resolution

Not being disrespectful to construction folk, because they do a fantastic job, but the most technologically advanced that most construction people are is with the use of the mobile phone and email (just a year or so ago it would have been the mobile phone and a fax machine, so we have come a long way there already recently). So with Wave being so much like email it will be quick and easy to sort out problems before they get too big. It would be so easy if the Architect happens to be online at the time the Wave was started so the conversation could immediately turn into a real time chat and things are recorded as they happen.

Please see my previous post about security, privacy etc for concerns about the real time chat aspects of Wave.

Document Management

I think it’s a long-shot that Wave will replace specific document management software (eg Aconex, ProjectCentre or even Woobius for construction, or enterprise document management suites like Documentum, SharePoint and Trim) at enterprise level, but imagine the possibilities for small projects. Start a wave called Current Documents and attach all the current documents. Split the wave into document subject areas (eg Floor Plans, Elevations). Attach the current documents, add people to the wave. These people now have exactly the same view of the information that you do – “one version of the truth”. Split off particular documents into a new wave (eg drawings for the electrician or the plumber) and add the correct people to see only the documents that they need to see. When a document gets updated with the new version it is instantly updated to all the participants because they are all seeing that one and only copy of the wave.

Of course, SharePoint, specialist Document Management systems and even a Confluence Wiki could all handle document management simply and easily, but Wave is free (as far as we know right now, but there will probably be a premium version, like GAFYD) and is as simple as email. Now I don’t know if all of this can actually be done right now, but I hope to find out soon.

Forms

Forms are a vital part of Construction Project Management. The hark back from the good old days when nothing happened on a construction site without it being written on a form in triplicate and distributed to the relevant parties. It kept a level of control on the project and all parties knew where they stood contractually. But it was S-L-O-W. Email has obliterated the comforting level of control that we used to have, with decisions now being made on the fly, which has made it faster, but we have lost most of the control and often find ourselves catching up with the “official” paperwork months down the track. The overhead is enormous. ProjectCentre, (and I think Keystone) try to overcome this by having e-forms as the basis for their communications (Aconex just uses email templates). So it would be great if there was a way that the Wave could be a bit more structured with templates, form fields, controls and a concept like a “submit” button. To give a simple way to submit and transmit more structured data that may be required in some cases.

Now if this was then XML based and could have a bot that updates a corporate database once submitted, then that would be even better!

Photo Management

The amount of time wasted on construction projects with photo management is incredible, and a simpler way to share, track and manage photos is critical. Of course, on construction projects photos are critical and a picture tells 1000 words. Photos are used to solve disputes, record defects, record progress, record delays – anything (As the whole philosophy of a modern construction project is based around the concept of “Cover Your Arse”, the invention if the digital camera has been a revolution in construction).

Photo management as easy as snap, upload, drag onto the wave, tag and share is a long way from folder upon folder of untagged and undated photos on the corporate file share. Of course, flickr and just about any other web based photo album app makes it easy to upload photos and the wonderful EyeFi card makes getting the pics off the camera simple, so Wave does not have an advantage there. But I think the sharing of the images is what is going to make the difference.

So there are 30 pictures of some defects in a room. 15 are for the plumber, 10 for the plasterer and 5 for the electrician – and 2 are good enough to send to the client as progress shots. Just drag the 30 photos on to the wave and tag them. Highlight the 15 shots for the plumber and add him to the wave for those shots. Do the same for the electrician and the plasterer. Then grab the two images for the client and publish them to the project progress blog. Simple! And a full discussion can be had with the electrician back and forth until the issues are resolved – all captured and recorded.

Now lets take that one step further and have the images sent directly from the mobile phone on site onto the wave – geotagged with their location. I’m sure that is going to be possible soon enough.

Mapping and Photos

This may not be specifically Wave related but it is just something I have been thinking of for a while now. We are so used to geotagged photos now that immediately appear on the map as soon as we upload to flickr. At Remix last week (the video for the keynote is not up yet but here is the link to the videos site in case it appears), Incite Keystone showed a prototype of a photo being taken on a mobile phone and then appearing on a map (not sure exactly what technology it was, something Microsoft – Bing Maps, DeepZoom, DeepEarth – not quite sure… and I’m not entirely convinced the whole thing happened automatically as it could have been a bit of smoke and mirrors, with the image having being pre-placed on the map for the sake of the demo, but I love the concept, regardless).

So what if we could take it one step further and rather than the map, have the photos placed on the location on the floor plan (or how ’bout inside the 3D model – but hey, one step at a time…). Now I know that GPS is not accurate enough to do this to the few hundred millimetre accuracy that it would have to be, so I would be happy to be able to drag a marker for the photo onto the correct location on the floor plan – just as you would placing a marker on o a google map.  I think this would be really useful – anything to make photos of construction projects easier to manage would be.

Federated Wave Servers

Now this is taking things to the Nth degree but it is still important. A lot of companies will be reluctant to use Wave at the moment because they don’t want Google “owning” their data. Thankfully many construction companies are “getting over” this limitation and using multi-tenanted databases with SAAS vendors like Aconex and ProjectCentre. However, there are still a number of industries that can not even think of having their data even off site, let alone in a database in a row next to someone else’s (Lawyers being a good example). So let them have their own Wave Server hosted on-premise, and all these issues go away. (I still think this is quite a long way away, however).

Another reason for a company to build their own Wave Server is for the volume and size of the documents… if they are big documents (eg large photos, or video) that need to be downloaded often, then it will be best to have the Wave Server in house.

Other Articles and Ideas

  • http://www.extranetevolution.com/extranet_evolution/2009/05/google-wave.html – As Paul Wilkinson mentions on this topic, once we can get Wave integrating with existing collaboration systems out there, we will start to see the full benefit of online collaboration systems. I can’t even begin to imagine what some of these integrations will be, but the possibilities are endless.
  • http://www.ddmcd.com/wave.html – I like this article as it talks about Soft Collaboration (eg Wave) vs Hard Collaboration (eg Aconex), and it also talks about the financial aspects of the project – after all it’s what the whole project is about – money. I will need to cover off money in another post… but the forms idea will work for the money side of things anyway.
  • http://www.thechangebusiness.co.uk/TCB/Blog/Entries/2009/5/31_Google_waves_for_construction.html – This article starts to talk about the design process – Wow, that brings in things like BIM and the whole design process – again lots to think about.
  • What about the social aspects for construction – Social Networking in any form has not ventured into Construction – you won’t even find many construction people on LinkedIn… will this change and evolve?
  • Facilities management – Everything you can do to manage a project during construction you can use to manage the building during it’s occupancy phase, so Wave will have a definite place there… but what about the possibilities of bots hardwired to the building talking to Wave and to each other… now that’s getting exiting…

I’m going to leave it there before my ideas start getting even more absurd, and I will be really interested to see if I come back from my first hands-on look at Wave tomorrow either way more exited or a bit more disillusioned.

Google Wave Must-Haves

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Whilst watching the fantastic Google Wave Video, here is a few thoughts I jotted down about things that Google Wave is going to need soon enough-ish to make it really really rock (not that it doesn’t really rock right now!).

  • multiple google instances – at the moment you can’t log into multiple gmail accounts in the one browser – Wave seems like it will work really well if you have ALL your accounts in one place. 
  • multiple emails for one person – similar to above – how to deal with your multiple identities, especially since Wave will be used more in the workplace now too… I like the new service called MyHandle.com which allows all your emails to come to the same email address yourname@myhandle.com and you then divert them to the correct email account.
  • authority – is this person who they say they are – a continual issue for all social networks, and since this will be a business app too, it is very important
  • spam – hopefully this will utilise the great gmail spam filters so hopefully it won’t be a problme
  • anonymity – will you be able to blip anonymously?
  • draft mode – they mentioned this quickly – the ability to control when the blip is visible. 
  • stop forwarding of waves – like the digital rights management built into outlook – control who can forward waves
  • groups – I’m sure it would, similar to gmail groups – a quick way to send Waves to everyone in the company.
  • google contacts needs to be sorted – Gmail contacts is really not ready for prime time yet – especially importing contacts.
  • will it replace email? – Will I forgoe my gmail and use Wave exclusively? this is yet to be seen.
  • notifications of content updates and ignoring all future notifications – Confluence has this feature, sometimes you just don’t want to know anything else about that topic.
  • event and calendaring – this was sadly lacking from the demo – I’m sure  it will be included but.
  • not allow playback or remove bits from playback – some things may not want to be played back.
  • real time markup of video – how cool would that be?
  • making waves public – probably quite possible as calendar items are public – but maybe restrictions on who in the Wave can make it public
  • Spell check for other than US – but hopefully, since it is built in Aus, they have thought of this.
  • People who can keep one topic to one Wave – now since most people can’t keep one email to one topic, this one is going to be hard. But this is where branching off a Wave will be useful.

Do you have any other must haves for Wave?

Google Wave Video Contents

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I watched the google wave video again tonight for the second time. Wow I love this product, platform and protocol! 

Since the YouTube video won’t allow annotations, I wanted to pick out the best bits so I could easily find them again, so I decided to create my own contents with time markers… so here is the contents and the approximate time markers, and some of my thoughts… I will do another blog post or two about things I love about Wave soon.

Wave video contents:

08:00 basic wave editing with spellchecker and offline message delivery

09:38 inline reply 

10:34 synchronous real time communication

11:50 private messages and adding people

13:20 playback the wave

14:46 private reply restrict access to a subset of the wave

15:22 adding photos to the wave and instant viewing of thumnails – never again issues with uploading photos (requires google gears)

18:36 start of api’s

19:05 bloggy bot adding wave content to the blog

20:45 blog comments

23:17 orkut integration so what? replace orkut with facebook then it’s cool

23:26 wave on mobile devices

26:48 editing a wave including editing other peoples waves “discussion and content creation in one tool” including markup of edits “we never said lets start a document”

31:40 a document view and playback include versioning and submit to the server and merge changes and source control integation – full document production – look out SharePoint!

35:33 synchronous editing with labels to see who is typing where – COOL!

37:20 right to left editing in the same wave as left to right editing and international text

40:19 organising waves – folders and saved searches and tags shared by all participants in the wave

40:55 Wiki Waves – COOL! – watch out confluence (although it will be a while before it matches confluence enterprise features)

41:49 Search – cool! – “the wave dance”

43:21 start of extensions

43:58 spelling – spelly – COOL! natural language recognition of words, automatic correction “icland is an icland”

43:39 Links – linky

47:08 Searchy google search inside wave – bye bye evernote!

48:00 You Tube – demo failed

48:50 open social apps inside wave

49:25 movie times 

50:44 yes no maybe gadget

51:35 sudoku and chess including playback of gadgets – quite cool

52:40 google maps integration – real time zooming of google maps in both waves – COOL

52:29 real time markup of google maps – imagine the possibilities for real time markup of pdf documents or video or pictures

54:04 the YouTube example working

55:02 start of server side robots

55:19 new poll – Polly the Polster – forms inside a wave – fill them out collaboratively – options for answers, synchronous updates of graphs

57:25 installing a wave

58:05 Twitter – a Twave! including Stephanie showing her twitter password! (tab between fields not implemented yet). Proxy contacts on a different system. Includes twitter search – they were real time searching on google wave during the presentation. Use twitter searches like twitter alerts (probably similar to google alerts)

1:01:40 Buggy – real time integration between wave and the code.google.com issue tracker – COOL – Imagine real time integration with Jira or TFS

1:05:20 start of protocols

1:05:50 federation – any organisation can build thier own wave system. Open port for federation. Linking to other accounts on other wave servers.

1:08:13 Initech’s wave server – command line based – cool!

1:09:20 private replies across servers. Copies of the wave on both Initech’s and Google’s servers. Replies within the same server never leaves that server.

1:10:20 technical explanation of federation and open sourcing of the protocol

1:11:56 synchronous language translation Rosy the bot – the COOLEST!

1:14:05 applause and summary

1:17:36 URL’s for product, platform and protocol