I scraped Reddit for ideas and Google for some links -- if you want to know what people are thinking about Wave and using Wave for, here's a start.
(Yes, this is saved in a wave)
Sources:
HTML:
http://lifehacker.com/5383221/three-google-wave-searches-worth-saving
http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/
http://completewaveguide.com/
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/a7rrh/seriously_what_do_i_do_with_google_wave_now_that/
http://code.google.com/apis/wave/guide.html
http://wavegadgets.com/
http://googlewavebots.info/
Scraped Reddit comments:
Wave has serious potential. The 'point' of wave is to aggregate all your communication in one spot. It's not quite to this level yet, but this is the potential of wave.
New post to a forum thread you follow?
New blog post on a blog you follow?
New reply to your comment on said blog post?
New tweet?
Change to a wiki page you maintain?
A discussion takes place and someone thinks your input would be valuable?
New text message? (IIRC, technically possible via the Google Voice APIs)
For all of the above, you can respond to it from your Wave inbox.
So it's almost like they're trying to create an entire desktop worth of applications, and put them into a single web-based app.
It is good for RPG's. It would be great for Project collaboration. It is not really so good for the average internet user.
A buddy that I met here on reddit and I are making a website and using google wave for all of our discussion and planning. We have also brought in a few other people who can view this stuff as well as have personal conversations in the same area. It's working great for us.
I've planned trips, a conference, and having some friends come to visit. It's pretty good for that, though I admit we've never had many people on there at once.
I'm really excited about the prospect of using it for university. So we can upload out CPP libraries and work/plan on projects easily. Sent some PM's trough reddit in the hopes of obtaining an invite. fingers crossed
Here's an idea... don't use it if you don't have anything to discuss. OR you and your friends could, for example, start writing a book together as a collaborative effort, and use WAVE to store ideas/notes/manuscripts. Or start a small game development team with them and use it to store your source and discuss your progress with each other. There are plenty of applications for WAVE, what you have basically done is picked up a hammer and started nailing stuff before deciding what you are going to make.
We get to develop games as homework for out Data Structure class, currently we have a week to make that restaurant game from facebook which i forgot the name of. Do you think it would be useful for us? What about for sharing programming classes and libraries?
My friends and I have done the following with it:
* Write an erotic/porno novel about our friends using clever pseudonyms (if their name is John Smith, their porn novel name is Ron Fifth).
* Create an RPG about Carl Sagan or something in a thread originally meant to talk about bad work stories.
* Album and Movie reviews. We used to have a forum for this, but everyone stopped going, so we decided to move it to THE WAVE.
* "Hey guys I am 8 years old" where we talk about Faygo and comic books and playing dinosaurs and building things out of Legos.
* There is also the "Hey Guys I am Drunk" wave for when we are drunk.
With
ublic is your friend right now. There are all kinds of neat things to find, though some of the larger waves are extremely laggy. Other thing to do is to create a wave about something you're interested in and then add
[email protected] to it, and it should be searchable using with
ublic.
Sudoku. Google Wave should be renamed Google Sudoku-- it really is an excellent vessel to play sudoku with your friends and random strangers.
My friend and I keep a collaborative dream log, so we can ask each other questions to try to jog our dream memory or just creatively expand the canon of our narrative dreams. We have regular discussions on there as well, and there'd probably be a million more uses if it ran in IE7 without chrome frame, but that's all I can use at work and we generally just IM or voice chat when we're both home.
Does anyone know what the "@googlewave.com" is good for? In the future, other people will be able to host Wave servers. And so users on those servers will be @somewhereelse.com -- It only looks like an email address.
At reddit, we use it to maintain our todo list. The first post is the master list. If you want to change the master list, you make a new reply with your proposed change, and then if everyone agrees, we edit the master list. When an item is finished, we edit the master list to cross it off. This way everyone gets input and everyone has access to the list so they know what to work on next.
It's like Second Life... Where it's only interesting if you know how to code/script things for it. And even then... things are slow and painful.
As for what you're suppose to do with it, it's the new e-mail. It's end base function is like e-mail and it's goal is to replace e-mail. But of course as of right now it can't accept real e-mail messages, it only accepts Wave messages. I am unsure about the integration of e-mail in the future. So that then gives you the issue that, it being e-mail like, you need to first KNOW people to message.
The public wave system was more of an after-thought. It's not part of the main product, and is nothing more than basically sending an e-mail to a public e-mail list server. If you don't know how to use Google Wave without the existence of a public wave address, then you're using Google Wave wrong.
This is NOT a social networking system. This is NOT a bulletin board. This is NOT a wiki. This is e-mail with chat, social networking, wiki, and bulletin board functions added.
Collaborate. Use it as a CMS for your sites. Chat. Make a TV show database online, and let people collaborate. That's what I do. Except for the last one - that one I /should/ do.
It's great if you need to collaborate with people on complicated projects. Especially if you don't all live/work near each other. Otherwise you're going to be bored with it already.
As far as I can tell, Google wave has 2 purposes, and both are tailored for business use. Purpose 1) Prevent the following document name from ever being sent through e-mail "important_document_v4_final_JL_final2.doc" Purpose 2) Provide a realtime task management system. A super "to-do" list.
Google wave needs:
* Granular Moderator privileges,
* Custom styling on a per wave basis.
* More ways to filter searches, ie, tags for waves and twitter like trending topics.
* It also needs a standalone version for corporate networks.
* If all of these criteria could be met, Wave could very easily replace Word, IM, Email, reddit, Facebook and Twitter.
I'm using it to collaborate with the folks I do a podcast with, to plan out our show, get our schedules together, sketch out ideas. It's a pretty excellent group editing tool. It isn't a replacement for email, and could never be until everyone you would potentially email is also using it (and they make a ton of interface refinements because it's nowhere near as friendly as GMail is in a lot of ways), which may never happen. But as a virtual table for smallscale collaboration, it's great.
Change the word 'wave' to 'thread', think of it as a graphical usenet.
