Beyond Messaging

Who Wants a Google Wave Invite?

I have a few Google Wave recommendations I can submit.  If you email me your email address I will give the first 5 people a Google Wave invite.  Or as many as I have left beyond 5 after my friends claim theirs. marianneDOTcaseATcomcastDOTnet.

If you are already on Wave, find me at MarianneNCT@googlewave.com and I play a mean game of Wave Sudoku.

Gravity Integrates Google Wave Functionality with SAP

...various features of true real-time collaboration are shown, such as different colour-coding for each individual modeller, history of a model, asynchronous and synchronous editing, and more. The demo also shows how robots (automated components that act as Wave participants) can be leveraged in order to syntactically correct the model on the fly. In the end, we will see how models are exported using BPMN 2.0 XML. They will then be imported into SAP Netweaver BPM for further refinement and execution.

SAP Community Network Blogs

One of the first business class use cases for Google Wave comes from the SAP Research labs in Australia. There is a nice demo video that shows how the collaboration tools in Google Wave can be used with SAP in the fictional merging of two companies business processes.

I am testing Google Wave myself, and I am interested in how I can integrate Wave functionality in with my TypePad hosted blog.

Reverse Innovation - Mass Innovation rather than Mass Production

Charles Leadbeater, author of We-Think, sees the new means of networked collaboration as presaging a new production model: 'Mass Innovation rather than Mass Production'.

via www.boingboing.net

Interesting quote from one of the participants in a British panel to be held next week on "The Future of Collaboration."

Can online technology make collaboration less intrusive and more productive? To me the trick is to manage the technology and not let the technology manage you. Learn when to turn it off, and when to spend the time to tweak settings so that you are pushed things that will interest you, rather than a lot of distracting noise.

I do think that innovation is the key factor for humans to thrive. With limited resources and an expanding population we have to learn how to be more efficient and do things better. And sometimes doing things better is actually almost a reverse innovation - and innovation back into simplicity, if you will. Like the kid making windmills to power homes in India out of bicycle parts.

How does online collaboration factor in? Take this for an example: I am a member of an online knitting community called Ravelry. Through the yarn forums I learn about a hand spun yarn made from sheep grown on a small farm. I am provided with an etsy.com link to the spinner's store and buy a gorgeous hank of hand spun yarn. The high tech online community (Ravelry) and the handicraft marketplace (Etsy) have enabled a small family owned farm and a hand spinner of fleece into yarn to have a profitable cottage business model.

I am not sure if this is what Mr. Leadbeater is writing about, but I am interested to read his book We-Think: Mass innovation, not mass production .

6 Tips to Help You Get the Most Out of Google Docs

Whether you’re a regular user or have just been thinking about trying it out, here are the top 6 tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Google Docs.

via sixrevisions.com

I was so proud of myself when I learned how to embed a document on a web page with Google Docs, that I was interested in this set of tips from SixRevisions.com, as well.

Did you know you can chat "in" Google Docs? That you can color code documents based on rules? Or that you can use the new drawing tools for flow charts and simple drawings? How about this - in the spreadsheets function you could set up a spreadsheet that pulls a data field live from the internet. I could envision the live update from the web being useful for things like currency conversions and stock prices.

Will Google Wave be Game Changing Software?

Mashable has an article up explaining 5 Ways Google Wave Could Change the Web.  Wave is a Real Time Collaborative Platform from Google that will arrive for a limited number of users on September 30th. It is an extendable, open source product with a number of collaborative and productivity features that programms can add to other applications.  There will be a Wave start page, rather like a beefed up email screen or control panel.  Also, you will be able to see pieces of Wave enabled code on other pages and programs. Of course some of the first of these nifty features will be seen in GMail and the other Google Apps, but they can be added to other applications as well, so ideas can flow in "waves" throughout the web, all linked and tagged together.

Some of the nifty features:

• Wiki-like group editing

• Threaded conversations not limited to being in the same application.

• Playback feature lets you get caught up on what people were talking about before you got involved.

• Extensible "gadgets" and "robots" are two types of embedding tools.  Gadgets being sort of like Facebook apps or widgets, and robots being sort of like agents or automated processes that can communicate with people.

I think that Google Wave does have a lot of potential and points to a more open and universal way to add collaborative features to various web enabled applications.  Because Wave has an open source API, programmers and site owners can add Wave features to all sorts of web pages, application, email, really anything.  Adding discussion threading, subject tagging, location based information, and all sorts of meta data to our various online stuff has the potential to really link it all together.

Trying to think about what these features can do can in the real world can be a little confusing.  Because its not implemented with our "stuff" yet, we have to imagine use cases.  The Mashable article is a good start to get the mind going on how businesses and individuals will use the features in Wave to add collaborative and CMS features to... well... whatever they want to add it to.

I have to say though... I have been working with Collaborative Computing since the days of Lotus Notes R3, and if there is one thing I have learned it is that people are fickle about whizbang applications.  The "killer app" is a had thing to predict.  I have seen many wonderful ideas just not take off, especially in the business world.  So I am very interested to see what Wave enabled features programmers bring us, and what practical applications take off with the crowd.