I woke up at 5.30 this morning from a strange dream (don’t ask). Wide awake, I made it out to my kitchen, put on some coffee and lit candles. I guess you can’t really tell from the picture, but I live pretty high up with a large corner balcony outside and a wide view over Stockholm. On mornings like this one, the ridiculous price I paid for this corner apartment is somewhat put into perspective. The view over the city with the lit up balcony in the foreground is just… what’s the word… inspirational.
Anyway, I picked up the morning newspaper and started reading about the Rasmussen brothers – you know the Danish Google-guys behind Maps and Wave. I’ve written about this before, but I really think it’s time to revisit Wave with the critical eye replaced by the creative mind. Wave is a remarkable toolkit, and I know that we can invent some seriously cool stuff using it.
There is a second coming of Wave surfacing all around the web. Among several posts I’ve read, Chris Brogan’s stands out as full of insight regarding the adoption cycle of new technology in general. Wave is unusually hard for us to adopt since we don’t have any reference to what it is. We had trouble adopting Twitter because we were all (including the creators of Twitter) fumbling around to figure out what to use it for. The original question “What are you doing?” turned out not to be the killer application as the creators thought, but has rather been replaced by “Why do you deserve our attention?”.
It took a lot of time for people (not least here in Sweden) to start adopting Twitter, and Wave is more complex. Merely explaining the basics took the Google people more than an hour. Weak and fuzzy explanations such as “what email would have looked like had it been invented today” were more like riddles than actual explanations, but as they so realisticly explained, it’s up to us to invent the uses.
And in the inspirational state that my early morning had put me in, I started filling sketchpads with ideas. There is just so much potential here.
One thing that I’ve been struggling with for example is how to organize our work at the agency. We left Basecamp because of it’s lack of Google Apps integration. We moved to Manymoon, but it somehow doesn’t feel intuitive (granted we haven’t used it much yet). But really, Wave is a perfect platform to build project management on. Sure, it lacks features still, but being open source, these will be developed. Perhaps by me. More than anything, it lacks thought through workflow however. Because it just haven’t been thought through. Figuring this out doesn’t require programming skills. It requires thinking and trial & error. But since this is probably the strongest and most future proof platform out there (again, it’s open source AND Google), I want to figure this out.
To that end I’ll create a post category here for Google Wave Project Management we’re I’ll post my progress and where I would LOVE you to post your ideas and links to other resources. It will be worth it, and it will be fun! Join in!
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One good resource on the topic:
http://www.theshinywave.com/collaboration/google-wave-for-project-management/
I would say Google is trying to grab everything in hand with a single product named WAVE. It feels as if wave would revolutionize the way Project management is done but i think if this is what is going to hapen in just becase of the Google brand.
Even we used Basecamp for quiet long till we found ProofHub.
http://www.proofhub.com
The best part, ProofHub has a UI similar to that of Wave.
Give it a try.
I think what is holding me personally back is the lack of my collaborators choosing to get on Wave, even though I have invites for them. I hear complaints about how hard it is to track conversations and how the UI is still too close to email.
Personally, I like Wave and think it has a lot of potential as a collaborative writing environment. It’s particularly suited to education.
What’s interesting is that while many people are reviewing Google wave as a Project Management platform, few have actually used it for that purpose, and almost none have used it extensively.
I’ve published an article a while ago on the ideal PM tool, you can find it here.
Thanks for sharing.
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