When you are a participant in a conference, Wave can make sense for you. I have some ideas regarding conference attendance.

When you are at the keynote, it is possible for you to open and edit the summary. In this way, you can write about your ideas on what is being discussed, and reflect on what others have written. This is something which requires a lot of mental capacity and multi-tasking; you need to follow what the speakers are currently saying, writing the content down and then comment on other spectators’ ideas on the keynote. The keynote is really interesting, because it talks about the direction of the company. There are a number of analysts, bloggers and journalists at place, who can write about how they see the keynote. It could be interesting for them to get comments from other people on the topic of the day.

For less crowded events like some presentations, you may find that you can create your notes live. Wave will allow you to create your own notes for each session, so other participants in the wave can see what is being written or if it is an interesting presentation. If it is possible to create good notes from your sessions you will be able to learn more. Other persons wanting to attend the same session at a later stage can see if it is interesting.

There will be some issues regarding rights of the content. I could imagine that some presenters do not like to see their content on the web, but it will hopefully be very few. The alternative is to blog about each session, where the same information can be disclosed. With wave you don’t need to have the content as super well formatted but you can let it be more in draft state. In this way you have your content the same way as other places.

Wave can also be used for less formal events, like finding places to go for dinner/lunch or just to start a networking session with some like minded persons. With wave, this will be easier if you can catch people’s attentions to the wave where you want to attract an audience about something.

Twitter is quite popular at conferences, where you are able to follow the streams. I have found, that I can only focus on one thing, what the speaker is saying or tweeting about what they have said. When I start writing my tweet, I lose focus on the speech and cannot see what is being said. It is also difficult to follow the twitter stream, to find interesting points. I read the other day that speakers also should follow the twitter streams, so they could respond in realtime to the event. I don’t think I’m able to speak and read from the twitter stream at the same time. Maybe wave will be easier to follow for a presenter, since it is just in one place all information exists. And you can see what people are writing at the moment.

I will try waving at the upcoming SAP Teched conference, to test if it is a useful way to work. You can follow the tag: sapteched09 and see the result of the experiment. A problem with the Waving is that not all participants have a Wave account, so it will only be a small subset who will use Wave.

The last challenge is that my new Asus Eee is very slow, when I’m working in Wave. I don’t think the small atom processer can run all the JavaScript. I’m not sure on how often it is sending data. Maybe the Wave client could be tweaked so wave can only sent data in every 5 characters, if the computer was to slow.

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