Google Wave for Business

In the last few weeks I have been able to do business over Google Wave.

First, I invited Alden Zecha, the president of the Boston chapter of the Princeton Entrepreneurs' Network, to use Wave for our collaboration on a the selection of a new service provider for event registration. This work took place over the course of ten days and we used Wave for offline messages and sharing links. This replaced Google Docs and email.

More recently, a friend and I are exploring the suite of Google Apps for Business to look for opportunities to add value and possibly create a new product. We have five or six Waves going now. We typically start a new one every day on a different topic. I sometimes find that we are both on line at the same time and both typing away at different points in the Wave. This allows two great minds to "talk" simultaneously and still be heard. (We both type about as fast as we talk.) It also allows us to go back and fine-tune or correct what we wrote earlier.

The ability to drop new text in at any point in a Wave is powerful but also hard to manage. it is especially problematic when participants are working on different parts of the Wave that don't fit on the same screen. Wave doesn't have a way to collapse the idle parts of the thread and just show the active blips.

Another nice feature of Wave is that I can have it open on two or three machines at once and they all show the same thing. (That would be very hard to do in email.) I like to be able to move from one desk or room to another and Wave allows me to do that without any break in continuity or any need to refresh or update the client.