Week 4: Collaboration using Google Wave

A couple weeks ago I began to work on week 4 of the assignment ‘Collaboration using Google Wave’. Already being a Google member I joined Google Wave and started to explore the different functions and capabilities that it has. I read many articles about Google wave and am aware that Google put a lot of work in developing Google wave and had a lot of high expectations. In actual fact Google Wave did the complete opposite and has not been a hit with a lot of users and is currently no longer being developed. It is expected that by the end of this year that Google wave will no longer be maintained and that resources will be spent on other Google products.

In using Google Wave for myself, I along with a lot of other users can see why Google wave has not been adopted. It has a very poor interface and does absolutely nothing in helping a first time user of the product. It took me about 5 hours of researching help tutorials (until I finally gave up) to work out how to add a person that I could speak to, and even then I still was not successful. Unlike many other products that I have used which are very self-explanatory, Google wave is very difficult and not easy to use. Now if I think this being a frequent computer and internet user, could you imagine a first time user??

When I got back to class I decided to speak to Jean-Pierre, who helped me in adding a few friends which I could communicate with. I began to blog with Jean-Pierre about how difficult this product was to use and some more about the events that occurred in today’s class. I was so happy to finally work out how to use it as I have never had so much difficulty in using a product before.

I believe that Google wave would be a very poor tool to use for communication between a client and an organisation as it is a task in itself learning how to use the tool let alone being able to communicate with a client. Chances are that you would probably scare a client off once you have tried to get them to use Google wave and you would lose a lot of business lol ;). Using it in a work place would also be ineffective because as I have previously mentioned users want something easy and exciting to use not something that busts your chops by the time you are able to use it (as I experienced) ;). I believe there are heaps better tools at there that could do exactly the same job as Google wave if not better and save you half the time.

Finally, I will not be using Google wave again for the reasons I mentioned above and have only explored it for the purposes of this assignment. To be honest I’m actually having more fun blogging about Google wave’s issues then using it which says something in itself lol. Google wave was like having to complete another assignment on top of the ones I already have and created a headache in itself.

Google wave, THIS WAS THE FIRST AND LAST TIME I WILL BE USING YOU!!!!!

Oh yeh and if you want to add me, my Google wave address is danielpaps69@googlewave.com, cheers.

This is me and Jean-Pierre chatting (I hope you don't mind Jean ;))