x-posted from www.thatdigitalstuff.com
At RTC we love to test new technology by putting it into practice (the daily grind) as much as possible. Our latest attempt was to use Google Wave as a collaboration and planning tool for a new business pitch. Rather than the internal network, Xinet, or (sigh) email, we wanted to use something that allowed real-time one -to-one AND one-to -many coordination in a single place. We also hoped the plug-ins (charts, drawing boards, and voting buttons) would allow for more emphatic and engaging content that would spark our brains and getting the creativity flowing. In theory, Wave would be the perfect agency tool. In practice, we suffered from the same, if not additional complaints as the rest of the digital scene. You can find a number of complaints online; Here are our top 5 :
5. Logging in is complicated and requires another username, password and account. You might be able to use your g-mail account, but not if you’re invite went to a personal account.
4. People can see you typing. Once you start typing, even if you decide not to post it, people have already seen it. Privacy is limited. And in fact there’s no need to actually post anything, you just have to type and delete. Type and delete….
3. Gadgets are cool, but you have to go find them on your own. They don’t actually exist in Wave. You have to go online, search for “google gadget for wave” and then add it. You would think there would be a menu in Wave for this…
2. Collaboration without chronology is a mess. You have the ability to respond to old posts, which sounds reasonable, but really hurts sensory input. I personally found receiving responses to old posts to be chaos- Wave doesn’t even alert you to these posts, so your left thinking no one has responded
1. It is sooooooo slow. So slow that we had to wait 3 hours for profile pics to upload. That’s enough time to plan our strategy, approach and start working on tactics.
In the end we saved everything to the network and communicated via email and meetings. Wave didn’t pass our test, though we did have fun comparing our complaints to the rest of the online world.
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