I remember there was a big hoo-hah about it a few months back, and now… nothing. Does anyone use it? Did anyone figure out what it was meant to be used for?
Sixty-nine views and no replies. I guess it really has died a death. 
I never could figure out what to use it for, so I didn’t.
It is still in limited preview mode and is invitation only.
As a general-purpose collaborative tool, it might be useful.
Except it locks up all crazy-like if any real discussion gets going.
It’s an extremely cool tool that can’t be described in a sound byte, and is looking for a problem to solve.
How often do you, and four of your friends, need to collobrate on a document, live, in real time?
Oh yeah. I forgot about that.
Yeah I don’t know what it does either. Does it have anything to do with Buzz?
Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, I get those. Very handy.
I have it. A group I’m involved with wanted to use it as our main info dump area… it didn’t work better or have anything going for it that couldn’t be done with the yahoo group we already used and the googledocs we already had started so… meh… I don’t even bother to check it.
I’ve used it quite a bit to help a friend decide on a computer, and to help my niece plan a garden.
In the first case, we were typing back and forth, pasting in links, making bullet points of desired features. The end result was a record of what we decided.
In the second, I was able to post pictures, a Google maps overview so the friend (Lissener) could see the light the garden would receive and from what direction. He commented on each picture.
I can’t imagine the mess of e-mails, or the convoluted gibberish of various logged chat room sessions that would be needed to approximate what we accomplished in a single Wave.
The problem with Wave is that most of the people who were excited about it don’t have the sort of problems it can solve.
I’m trying to get a client of mine into it. She’s a member of the board of a charity that puts on one large, yearly event that attracts thousands of people to the middle of nowhere (and it’s NOT Burning Man). They send thousands of e-mails back and forth, constantly having to search for the one where someone promised to do something.
Google Wave is the perfect tool for this. They can chat live when necessary, build documents, poll on decisions, plan the grounds, assemble vendor lists…thousands of group decisions that are, right now, hidden in the horrible mire of e-mail.
I assume this is deliberate by Google, but for me, trying to use it, it wound up being useless because it was so limited. In their defense there was absolutely no reason for me to expect it to be any different. But it was like they just came up with e-mail for the first time and they were only letting select people try using e-mail. So you have the Internet and this new cool service called e-mail and literally thousands are using e-mail out of the hundreds of millions who use Internet, but you don’t know who they are and they’re probably not the people you work with. Maybe I’d have liked it better if I worked at a large organization instead of a small organization that partnered with many other organizations.
One of the first things I got with Google Wave was a whole bunch of invites. And everyone I invited also got those invites. So, if I planned, I could easily equip a reasonably large company or organization with Wave in a short amount of time. Make the first Wave a list of people to invite, add everyone to the Wave and have the new people check off the people they invited.
I hope to use it. I know of the kind of ways I can use it. But those haven’t begun happening yet, plus Wave is still in Beta which it seems to be taking a long time to move out of.
Google doesn’t seem to mind. Didn’t Gmail just leave beta?
Wave is not yet feature complete. They just added the ability to be notified by e-mail whenever any of your Waves are updated. They just added the ability to start waves using a number of different templates - Meeting, Discussion, Task Tracking, Document and Brainstorm.
It’s stable enough for my usage with one or two other simultaneous participants.
We considered and rejected it because we didn’t have the time to deal with continuous platform updates in our organization. As even the IT staff doesn’t quite know how to use it, providing support for non-IT savvy staff would be a nightmare.
I’m getting a children’s hair salon on Wave. It perfectly suits their scatterbrained management approach.
I’ve used in my non-profit work as a brainstorming tool when people are not in the same location. It gives us the opportunity to look and comment on one draft, ask questions, comment, and ultimately take the results into another format for public consumption.
Works well, if everyone remembers to use it.
Eli
The new ability to automatically e-mail people that an update has happened helps.
Which is ironic considering Google Wave was intended to replace email.
Well sure, but being practical you need to ease people in. Better to make a tool that CAN replace email but use it as well as it first, let it become established and widespread, then see it as the primary electronic communication tool. You don’t need email alerts to use wave if you’re accessing it regularly, but at this stage it’s likely you wouldn’t be (and Google know that).