Last week Google announced that they stopped developing Wave. Wave is a ground-breaking online collaboration tool that allows users to work together in real time. The underlying goal of Wave was to be “the next big thing” after email. The technology behind Wave is impressive and for sure will trickle down to other applications in Google’s portfolio. Much has been said about the different reasons it failed, and I don’t see much reason to repeat it. I would like to speak about one concept that Wave employed that hopefully will live on - the idea of putting everything in one place.
Wave gave the user a blank canvas with which to work. The canvas could be used to write text, share documents, upload images, manage tasks, create diagrams and even build a custom application to meet particular needs. Everything that was created/added was in one thread (Wave). Putting technology challenges aside, the idea is pretty neat, and it’s especially beneficial for collaboration. One of the reoccurring themes in my online collaboration experience is the ongoing need to manage the collaboration activities – keeping everyone updated, making sure files are versioned, and cleaning outdated information. This is because most affordable and popular collaboration means are a mash-up of different tools – chat, email, tasks, calendar and documents. The result is a collaboration environment that is separated into different silos. The need to bridge the silos is evident. Improving the intuitiveness and the transparency of collaboration tools will increase productivity. Tools that achieve these goals have the potential to become ubiquitous with collaboration.
Facebook can be looked at as a good example for intuitiveness and transparency. A user can easily make status updates and view her friends’ updates in one intuitive and transparent interface. Imagine a business collaboration application that lets you, post messages, add comments, send email, manage tasks, share documents, schedule meetings and more in one centralized place. Wouldn’t be nice?
Google has everything in place to make such an application by marrying key features from Docs, Calendar, and Gmail into a social network-like interface (something similar to Google’s Buzz). Here is an example how it can work:
· John: create a new thread “Acme Proposal” and invite Sahara and Mark to it.
· John: uploads Acme original request, and share two other documents – standard contract and product presentation.
o All files are stored by the application in the “Acme Proposal” folder that corresponds to the thread.
· Sahara: review Acme request and modify the product presentation to match the request.
o The application inserts a comment “presentation was updated by Sahara on…..” and link to the document version history.
· Mark: review Sahara’s change and add comments on the presentation.
o The application displays those comments on the thread.
· Mark: schedule a meeting to discuss possible changes to the contract.
Using a social network interface as a collaboration platform for the Google Business Application can really make it the next big collaboration tool and a great comeback for the core idea behind Wave, and have the potential to become ubiquitous with online collaboration.
