Is Google Wave going to help your team?
October 6th, 2009 by Peter Stern · comments · http://blog.zenbe.com/jebbrWe created Shareflow with the banal goal of getting our important online communication out of chat, out of our overloaded inboxes, and putting it somewhere where we could actually use it, focusing where we need to. Via a website or mobile device. Accessing it once a day, once a week, or once a second – that shouldn’t matter. Want to lurk on a conversation? Want to dive in and add some value? Do either, without overloading your, or anyone else’s inbox.
Shareflow is based on a simple idea: take a conversation with a specific audience, and treat it like a living, breathing thing. Conversations are alive. They are born. They persist. They die. Conversations can be about anything. They happen at different speeds, and they can happen anywhere.
We thought Google Wave had the same idea. Boy, were we wrong.
Google Wave is fun to play with. Its nifty. The protocols are cool. Developers love to play with it. So do I.
Is Google Wave going to help your team work better together? No way!
Do you really want to replay a wave to figure out who said what when?
Should everyone in my conversation be able to edit everything all the time?
There are already numerous public Waves talking about how not to use Wave.
Online messaging, the important parts, are often focused on information creation. This has natural steps or cycles, neither of which is supported by Wave.
Lets talk about information creation. It’s not important whether its the new artwork for the annual report, the sales forecast, or a new software library.
We start when someone takes a stab at creating a version. Then its discussed, then one or many take another stab. Repeat as necessary. When the audience agrees no more tries are needed, we are done. Perhaps the information is passed to a different audience, and things start all over again. There is a shared understanding of what constitutes a “try” or what “done” means.
Google Wave rips apart what a “try” is, or what “done” could mean. Its refreshing. Its creative. Its just not helpful.
I have worked in meetings where 5 or 20 people try to draft a document together. Its always horrible, and never successful. The coffee runs out. Just as well, its bad coffee. The meetings end with a few people being selected to create the next draft. Lawyers are driven to work this way. Its an ingenious way to increase billable hours.
Wave reminds me of those meetings. Even worse, Wave treats a conversation like a bunch of people talking at the same time. If you want to understand what was said, you have to listen to the recording. This is not how people want to work together.
People want more structure than that. They need a beginning, the middle part, and sometimes, an end.
I wax poetic. If you want a more concrete description of why Wave doesn’t add much yet, just read this.
We all agree email is awful. Google Wave may get there. Happy Google is innovating on the problem. They just need to stop being cool for cool’s sake, and think about how the rest of us think.
- rhetorics.
weave – It’s free,
it has unlimited space
it’s fully customizable
google api means it will take all variety of forms and implementations
play with it or work with it depends on you, it always does
shareflow – 25Mb
sign up after sign up even if you already have signed up for free/paid zenbe account
paid for space, nowadays when everything counts in Gb’s
and yes – “problem with e-mail” – no e-mail – no problem
plus forget about all the terrific features you got used to on your zenbe mail
Did they steel smth from you or their price was too low?
Weave, I mean Wave is NOT Free.
No online service is free: people invest time in these things, in the hope that they will be enabled to accomplish more with their time later. GBs are cheap, time is expensive.
Shareflow is all about SAVING you time. Wave is more about SPENDING your time.
Good points about Wave, especially the one about everyone talking at once.
Nevertheless, Wave will not get anything done for anyone until it’s opened up to the public. This exclusiveness right now is ridiculous.
Shareflow is expensive. Free plan is very very limited and not practical.
Shareflow do not have a normal notification of new messages and not highlights new unread messages and comments. The search does not highlights the searched word or phrase. Daily digest sends the update is not for the last day, but for its first part, while nothing happened.
Has no text formatting.
So far Shareflow inconvenient, though very interesting and feel the potential. I repeat that now it is not convenient.
And if it is possible to delete a message or comment, then why is not possible to edit it?
But again. The biggest problem so far – this is notification of new messages and highlighting of unread.
Trash-talking the competitions products is not cool. you may be right, but it’s still not cool…
@Ilya
We’re working on several of the features you listed, but Shareflow is a tool that evolved out of real world use cases. Rather than theorizing about what users could do with Shareflow we’ve tried to be disciplined and wait to see what they are doing with Shareflow. We then implement the features that make sense for the most users. As a small team, this helps us stay focused and avoid feature bloat.
@Maxx I presume you aren’t a big fan of Apple…
http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads
We don’t intend to trash talk Google. We do want to get the word out that there are alternatives.
@ Shareflow Team
My colleagues were unable to use Shareflow. They are constantly confused and generally forget about the fact that there needs to verify the updates in the flows. I constantly had to help them how and what to do.
Three days ago we received an invitation to Google Wave. Understand what and how it was much easier. My colleagues have started to use Google Wave simply and quickly. No any confusion anymore. We immediately began to chat and work.
I personally like the concept and interface of the Shareflow. But having tried Google Wave I want to report that it is very convenient and powerful tool. It is more convenient than Shareflow even for those purposes for which created Shareflow.