A new version of Google Documents is now on its transition process and a list of better features are presented to the public for a more developed data management. Here are a few to mention:

Real-time collaboration

In this new addition, users are allowed to see updates from other collaborators as they do changes or editing in a specific document on a real-time basis. This feature is very helpful especially in situations when problems occur.

Higher quality imports

There is a better consistency of importing from a desktop into Google Docs. Scanning through files is no longer a hassle.

Communication through Chat

This is the most exciting part with the new version of Google Docs. As a user makes changes, he or she can communicate with other collaborators through the use of chat within the document itself.

Ruler

Google documents have a ruler for setting margins, indentations, and tab stops.

These improved features above make Google Docs a lot more fun to use, however, many might be asking now if this innovation will affect Wave.

Is this going to be good for wave or will this mean that wave is no longer up for use? Or, does this mean Google Docs will gain better advantage over wave when it comes to collaboration?

Despite of these uncertainties, what’s good about this is that there are still remarkable differences between the two. One to point out is Docs doesn’t have the ability to work with robots which Wave is capable of doing.

Many might suggest that it may possibly be more interesting if Docs becomes a client of Wave. This way, collaborators can edit documents using Wave or vice versa, which really makes integration and work collaboration easier and faster.

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For the Google Wave meetup we in Copenhagen today, we did all the planning regarding the meeting in a wave. It did not work out. It was only three participants how showed up to the meetup, and it was all the presenters or organizers. I hope that it is just the weather, but think there could also be some part of the wave usage that could be different.

We did some mistakes that I will probably do again, but at least try to avoid.

• First we did a survey about when to have the meeting, and we had to change the time because it did not fit with the schedule of university where the event should be held.
• I also asked people to contribute and participate in create an agenda. Most people are not interested in giving presentations, but instead what to learn. Which is why the meeting is taking place.
• We did not send out reminder mails. It would probably be a good idea to send out reminder mails to all the involved participants in the wave a day or two before. Many people may have mute the wave so they don’t see it as a reminder that an upcoming event is taking place.
• Did not have a clear RSVP where people could indicate that they were going to attend.

So next time we are going to plan a meetup. We will create an agenda and a place a head of time and then add people to sign up to the event. I if they want then people can contribute to the agenda if they want more topics.

I will also send an email to all persons how have indicated that they would like to come or are coming. That will for me sometimes make it easier to attend.

Planning meetings might be something that will be much easier to do in 12sprints, since you have a much more controlled environment for creating decisions.

I talked with Jacques Holst about planning, and he said the web never had been a one communication strategy. I think we have to remember that there are many other forms of communication to look for.

Image by Jonas K

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I got a tweet from Marilyn Pratt about @CrisisCamp was using Google Wave to aid in their organization with regards to their effort in Haiti.

CrisisCamp is using both Wikis and Google Wave for their effort in collaborating with their support. CrisisCamp is about helping NGOs with supporting their technology needs.

Their main wave can be found on this link. The Goal with the Wave is:

Join camps, activities, people and learning in this effort to support Haiti. And do this synchronously and in real time.

It seems that Google Wave will provide a better helping. But it is fair more accessable than a wiki, and you can start with editing with out the hassle of wikis.

I sure hope their efforts will help save lives in Haiti.

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There as been a taskboard gadget for Google Wave for a long time that we talked about in the Wave calendars first day.  The idea with this gadget was to make it simple to promote ideas between users and make then able to manage the project.

On MasteringWave we have produced a new Taskboard gadget, created in flex where there is spend some more time on the interface to make it look wave-y. The gadget lets you assign users to tasks and view which tasks are unassigned.

I have created a small video demonstrating how the gadget works.

To get access to the link, join our newsletter on the right menu then you will get a link to the gadget. (I need to make some tweeks before I can send it out but it should happen within a few days).

The taskboard gadget fits very well with our other scrum gadget the Wave Planning poker gadget. Do you think there are any tools missing to create a better scrum experience.

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One of my favorite blogs on Google  Wave (The Shiny Wave)  have picked up a Wave with Etiquette on Google Waves. The interesting aspect is that when you are working with somebody else you can get a lot of noise or disturbance. Many times when you are collaborating with a lot of other people you are missing the rules for the conversation. This etiquette is a way to make some of the rules more global.

With no Access Control Layers (ACL) or rules it is not possible to ban people from editing any part of the Wave. That mean if you have public waves or to a group waves you need to hope your users does not make any changes. So Google Wave is build on trust and you need to trust the people in order to make posts go nuts.

There is a good judgment of people not to mess up any documents. An example is the The Declaration of Independence, where it would look really strange if anyone changed on the wave. It seems like nobody are vandalizing the document. On a side note the document and users seems to originate from thirteencolonies.net, which must be a hosted domain. So you can share from hosted domains to Wave. Can anyone edit in the Wave hire?

The blog on the Shiny Wave mentions a Wave By Elliot Cable, which talks about the different types of moderation. All waves should med have on of the following tags. I would suggest you to go to the wave to get the full idea of each type.

• tag:moderated: is the mildest form of moderation and therefore give most discussions.
• tag:edit-moderated: is where only the initial blip should not be changed but the rest are more relaxed.
• tag:reply-moderated: is where the participants should collaborate in a separate Wave, the Wave owner will then transfer the content to the Wave.
• tag:locked: is when you don’t anybody to edit in your Wave, so why use Wave?

One problem is that you have to understand the difference between those four levels of interaction. If you have not written the rules or been a part in the generation, you will not know how to see the difference and what you are allowed to to on the current Wave. This could stop people from taking a part in the discussion.

Most if not all of the rules described hire should be possible to implement programmatic. It would make it much easier for users to implement the changes suggested. Then it is just to make the changes a part of the ACL for the Wave protocol, which obvious also needs to support the changes.

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In an experiment described on WaveOnBusiness, which deals with Wave in a publishing company. The idea of using Wave for publishers has apparently stretched even further. Why not use Google Wave as a news platform. It would be strange to use the term newspaper or newsletter, but newswave would be more appropriate term. Lets see if the term catches on.

Bjarne P Tveskov has started the first internet magazine, I have seen, called Bølgendk. The magazine is only in Danish, and you can find it hire. It is a summary of some news created for the last week and should be published weekly. The idea could also be relevant for any other niche marked you want to write about. It could be something in your local community or about your business passion.

Newswave could be used as a way to create/deliver local news for a small area. It would require some editors how could create and edit the initial comment, so you were sure to cover the most elementary. Then other users could create the missing pieces, so i could write about the project we are doing in the community or the result of the local football match.

The concept of having a place where all readers can comment on news is just interesting. Users can contribute to your news feeds to the ideas and get more feedback. Dependant of  you readers/contributors you will be able to create a comprehensive newswave .

One of the important concepts with a paper is to get readers, because then you can also sell ads. It is the same for web sites, the more readers you have the more you can make.

At the moment there is not a lot of users on wave, but the users are quite passionate about Wave and try to use it for different things. At the moment of writing there are 50 users on the current edition, which is probably not enough to have much revenue. If you get more involved it could probably be possible to support the Wave with ads.

When the next edition is created you also want to have the same 50 subscribers. So there should be developed a way to make sure all subscribers get the new newswave. This could probably be done using a robot.

Business could form for editing the waves and organize the way users can contribute to the news stories. So we can contenue to have local news and create application to support the way users are creating the content.

I’m looking forward to see if newswave will take off, and be the place to go for news on current events.

I’m also a blogger at WaveOnBusiness.

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Using wave in an organization can be a little challenging, when you don’t have Google Wave for your domain. Or if you would like to arrange a party or just be a group together. There are no problems if you only need to use one Wave, then you don’t need to invite all other participants to the new wave.

Google as implemented a group features in Google Wave. The function is build on top of Google Groups, so you have to create a Google group for each group you have. I would guess that this structure will create many new Google Groups with out any content in, since they will just be used for provision.

To create a new group follow these steps.

1. Create a Google Group on http://groups.google.com
2. Add the Google email of the users you want to add to the group.
3. Add the samplegroup@googlegroups.com to the contacts. Click the + sign and enter the group email. Just ignore the errors and press enter.
4. Add the group to the current wave.

I have created a video showing how this works.

To see content from the group, just search for group:demogroup@googlegroups.com. This will give all waves containing the group, so you can see what is going on in the group. When you are added to any of the waves, you will see the content in your inbox. This way it is much easier to find the Waves you have commented on.

A small issue is the wave username does not always correspond to the gmail username. So you need to find the users gmail account instead of their wave accounts.

I would also hope there will be an easier way to manage the groups from inside Wave, so you could just drag the users up to to the place they are using.

Using Groups is defiantly a thing, which needs to be improved for enterprise users. It could be a feature of Wave for my domain. On Wave for my domain it would make sense to be able to uses the groups you can define in the administration. These groups are your mailing lists or organization structures, so it will be a much more interesting place to administrate the groups. That way you don’t need to provision any other place.

For more information on Groups check out this Wave where the solutions is described in more details with a good FAQ.

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I wrote about how Wave could be used for documenting conferences in this post. Unfortunately I was only able to write a little, because of a shaky Internet. And beeing offline does make it a bit more deficult to write in wave at the same time. I did write some notes from some keynotes and lectures, but there needs to be more people working on the wave at the same time, otherwise you could just as well use Evernote for the notes.

Since SAP Teched there has been two conferences for Enterprises/Wave with relevant content. The first was eComm in Amsterdam where the starting wave is this.
This starting wave is a index, contain basic information about the venue and a list of all the different session with waves. In the Waves it looks like one or two authers has written the main blip, while others have commented bellow. A wave form the event from the session “Why Should You Care About Google Wave?”, is dealing with Wave and is the most interesting.

The intro Blip is have not been touch, but a lot of people have commented on the wave. With this form of communication you get a lasting conversation, and are able to have a conversation about all the different areas covered. Presenters can also help sorting out some of the questions.

The other conference is the E2conf, which is currently taking place in San Fransisco. The main wave is this wave. The layout is almost the same. On some waves they have more tags concerning how has created the wave. The use of tags will in future make it easier to do research.

An example of a Wave from E2conf is the debate about Integrating Google Wave into the Enterprise. This has a main blip written by three authors. After the talk a Ben Kepes wrote about highlights from the talk at a blog with the same name. Using this form of communication will make it much easier for bloggers/reporters to capture everything and create their versions of the content.

I like being able to read what has been said in a presentation. That way I don’t have to see the presentation, if nothing new has happened. It will make it much easier to find the content worth looking into. Get the links showed on it.

The TEDxCopenhagen is currently running. They are writing in this wave in Danish. They are just using one wave, but the depth of the conference is probably not as big as for a 1 hour session. So each session has its own blip, where the comments are written in. It make it really easy to see what is live and who said what. But you cann’t have discussions about any items in this context.

It is interesting to see someone typing, a summery of what is going on live. With each of those waves you have someone to talk to, how is also interested in the topic and you can learn more from the sessions.You can also find pictures someone has taken, so you can illustrate your posts.

I hope there will be more waving from conferences, because it adds more content than you get from the tweets.

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It has been interesting to see that SAP is working with Google Wave. SAP has been innovating but not all of the work has been publicized because it was difficult to find the correct format for publishing the research. Some of the results have probably been taken into SAP products, but it is probably very little.  The release of Gravity for Wave SAP has showed to the public that they know how to innovate.

In the Demo Jam at SAP Teched 09 in Vienna, Lars Rasmussen (Google Wave Team) and Alexander Dreiling (SAP) did a demo. They had 6 minutes to do the demo in. They first introduced Wave to thee audience and then they showed off Gravity. They show an extension of Gravity, where it was possible to see the execution of the process model. This model was driven by Business Objects Live Enterprise and was a dashboard, which shows how each step performs.

See the video by Dennis Howlett video of the event.

On a wednesday presentation, Alexander showed the next steps for the Wave integration. SAP is working on a tool to design some Gui screens to be used in the process. With a combination of these two tools all the business users can define their processes, build the user interfaces, run the processes and monitor the status. This will be very powerful to be able to do. The tools will target business users with limited IT skills and make them able to develop and run their own processes.

I was lucky to talk to Alexander Dreiling from SAP Labs in Brisbane, one of the people responsible for the Gravity. He said that SAP was trying to figure out what the community meant about Wave and if it was something that businesses want. Being a large organization, it was difficult to get some ideas into the market, if it should follow the normal release procedures. He talked about if an open source model could be used. Releasing the tool under some open source license would make it possible to get the tool into the market much faster and solve some of the support problems. SAP would like to get much more feedback and a faster development cycle.

Before Gravity could be released it had to undergo a rewrite to fix some of the bugs and make the code more maintainable. Alexander also talked about porting Gravity into Flex to have a more stable foundation to use for Wave development. Google Web Tool kit had some limitations.

I was not sure about the status of two other tools was in the development process. A screen capture will be created soon, which demonstrates one or both of the tools. I’m looking forward to see what tools is cable of and it they will be interesting for organizations. It will also be interesting if SAP can create a business model for the tools.

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I was recently a speaker at a librarian union, where persons brought up the tagging functionality as important for users. Some saw their own role with Wave as someone who had to perform work with helping users create ontologies or taxonomies for the data stored in the wave. This made me think a little more about how the tags in Wave can be applied and the reasons to do it.

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-on-business-card/6991/

Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification. Tags can be found in almost any Web 2.0 application, and is a way to organize data into some more user friendly categories. Tagging can be done by the user who submitted the content or by anyone who has access to seeing the data.

Source: http://www.google-success.com/

While people use tags, it just takes up extra time when browsing. According to Gene Smith in Taxonomy of tagging systems , tags are used to help with:
1. Future Retrieval – marking something so it can found later (aka refindability)
2. Contribution and sharing – adding tags for the “value of known or unkown audiences”
3. Attract Attention – “to get people to look one’s own resources”
4. Play and Competition – formally in the ESP Game, informally in tags like squaredcircle (over 40,000 photos!) and sometaithurts
5. Self Presentation – “to write a user’s own identity into the system as a way of leaving their mark on a particular resource”
6. Opinion Expression – making value judgements, e.g. bullshit

All these points make sense from a business perspective, where we want more structure of the data.
If the user cannot find the document fast, it actually does not make a lot of sense in to create it in the first place. Then the information will only stay within the person(s) head, who created the content in the first place. This might be correct in some instance where you just want to create some feedback and create a decision on something. If the content is something, which needs to be published, it does make sense to organize it, so it is easier to find for other people.

I also think attracting attention is interesting, and something which underline the statement above. If you can get people attention and show you have created something useful, you will be seen more as a person who is useful for the organization. This has also something to do with self presentation, where the individual has the power to learn information.

There are some content where tags are unnecessary, because it does not fulfill the properties above. That will be a natural behavior, it also says something about that the content is not worth anything for someone else. Content without any tags can then be prioritized lowest for the voting principle.

A problem with tags is:
“Two people choose the same main key word for a single well known object less than 20% of the time.” Study from 1983 quote by Joseph A. Busch from www.taxonomystrategies.com.
This is an old study, but I don’t think that much have changed in the field. So I would guess this still to be valid. But it shows that we need to use more than just one tag, to make it much easier for people to see the same information.

It would be useful for organizations to teach about how they want to use tags. Much of the tagging should be self explanatory, so new employees can use it. I think it can be allowed to use a more specific organization taxonomy. I also think that giving people some education in how they can best create tags will make it much easier for them to find the content.
The problem without strict control of the tagging, will mean that people are less inclined to use the ideas and just skip tagging.

For organizations it will make sense to use some of the knowledge that the libaryans already has learned the hard way. They should just somehow be able to teach the other on how we can implement tags our self. It will probably be different to use tagging in Wave than in other applications, but the systems can be adopted.

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