Google Wave: Collaboration Reworked

Over the past several years, Internet users have become accustomed to Web 2.0 and cloud computing-style applications. It's commonplace and even intuitive to drag and drop gadgets on personalized start pages, to comment on a Facebook post without reloading the page, and to compose and save documents through a web browser. The web paradigm has completely shifted over the past 15 years; it's evolved into a multiauthored, participatory communication space.

But what about email? And instant messaging (IM)? Apart from some interface improvements (think Gmail), these tools have remained fundamentally the same over the same period of time. Now, thanks to developers at Google, email and IM may be in for some competition.

Google Wave, first unveiled in May 2009 and released to its first 100,000 invitees in September, is a new communication protocol, platform, and client designed to replace or supplement email, IM, and online collaboration tools like wikis.

Initial reactions have been mixed. Some people find its capabilities fascinating and eminently useful; others are skeptical, finding it too complicated or uninteresting to go beyond accepting an invitation to the beta. The blogosphere has been filled with potential use cases as people investigate the possibilities Google Wave offers (see the Link List for some ideas). A lot of what's got Wavers excited are features enabled by third-party extensions, in the form of gadgets and “bots,” that extend the capabilities of Wave beyond mere text or images. Extensions can be as simple as polls, or as complex as video chat systems; bots can enrich the Wave space by providing connections to and automated updates from other tools, like Twitter or PubMed.

And, yet, most users are going to compare it to the tools they already know: email, word processors, and online collaboration tools. It's important to know why Google Wave may or may not be the choice for any given purpose when stacked up against these familiar standbys.

Everyone knows that email has issues. Let's say you are working on a newsletter article for your library with a few colleagues over email. You have two main options: composing the text in the email body, or composing it in a text editor and attaching the file. Either case presents obstacles for collaboration. To compose text jointly in the body, it's often a matter of copying the first draft, pasting the copy into a reply email, and editing it. But sending back and forth drafts as attachments is even worse. Even if the attachment is always successfully included (size restrictions and forgetfulness being major challenges for email users), tracing the corrections multiple people make is tricky. Add another collaborator midway through, and it gets even messier.

Or say you're a moderately tech-savvy outfit choosing to draft the article via Google Docs. Editing a single document online solves the versioning issues and the multiauthoring problems, but, then again, to track changes by different participants in real time, users have to subscribe to an RSS feed or email updates. Having to employ multiple systems to work with the tool effectively means the experience is less than seamless.

Now let's say that you and your colleagues are working on the same newsletter article over Google Wave. You can add collaborators at any time simply by dragging their username from your list of contacts into the wave. They will have access to the complete wave from start to finish, with a handy replay button to show how the wave emerged over time. Each wave is composed of wavelets (threaded conversations) and blips (single comments) and may contain text, images, files, links, and gadgets. To write an article, a single wavelet could be edited by all the participants, along with any threaded comments when discussion is needed.

Google Wave's main “wow” feature is real-time collaborative editing. Even before Google acquired competitor EtherPad in December 2009 to get a lock on real-time text-editing technology, it was clear that this was the main event.

Here's how it works: when anyone is editing a wave, other participants will see what's being typed as it happens—including any spelling errors. This is a feature that really can be off-putting to new users, because it forces you to think before typing (or stop caring about typos). IM and chat at least offer the potential to rejigger text before it's sent to others; Google Wave's openness may actually end up stifling some users' contributions to the dialog. An option to work in draft mode (similar to IM) is in development.

Google Wave displays current editing through a colored box with the participant's name next to where their cursor is active. Because the tool operates like a combination of a wiki (multiple users can edit the same text) and a commenting tool (you can reply or comment on blips and wavelets), identifying who wrote what can be thorny. As a visual cue to indicate multiple editors, each blip or wavelet that has multiple contributors will display each user's name at the top.

There is no stated limit to the number of participants per wave, unlike EtherPad's free version, which limits each pad to 16 collaborators (Google has stated that it will keep EtherPad up and running until March 2010 and has openly released the product's source code). Many Google Wave users have discovered, however, that as the number of users goes up, even sideline observers, overall performance diminishes. Participants, of course, also need Google Wave accounts (see below on how to use your social network to track down an invitation).

Google Wave's real-time editing can be used much like IM capabilities integrated into Gmail or Facebook, simply by replying back and forth to blips in a wave. In addition, users can “ping” one another. A ping will notify other users you are trying to contact them, and the completed conversation will be saved as a wave for later access. Pings can also be created within a wave to start a private chat with another participant.

Other tools like EtherPad and Google Docs spreadsheets have built-in chat panes, which don't exist in Wave; if a chat or IM-like interface is desired for communication while editing together, it's possible to add these features by installing the right gadget or extension to a wave. Retro Chat is a chat gadget (available in the Google Wave Samples Gallery), and Video Chat Experience is an extension available from the Extensions Gallery. (Wave users should look in their inbox for a wave from Dr. Wave to access the Extensions Gallery.)

The best online document editors like Google Docs and Zoho Writer offer a number of different features that make them strong competitors to their offline counterparts. Such features include revision histories to monitor changes in a document or to revert to older versions, commenting, and, of course, multiauthoring capabilities. At present, it's difficult to see Google Wave actually replacing Google Docs or Zoho Writer as a place simply for collaborating on complex documents; many standard features of word processing tools are just not present, particularly the ability to format a document easily or to export waves to other formats.

Google Wave does have a revision history, accessible through the playback feature. It's not as robust as a revision history in a wiki, blog, or online word processing tool, but it does allow a quick view of how a wave emerged over time by dragging a slider bar across the time line. This feature is most similar to the Time-Slider feature in EtherPad, though it doesn't let a participant bookmark a previous version. Also unlike EtherPad, there is no infinite undo capability—once something goes into a wave, it remains in the history. It's unclear whether this feature will be integrated into Wave or not.

As mentioned earlier, Google Wave's apparently unlimited number of users per wave is an advantage over Google Docs and Zoho Writer, which do have participant limits though at relatively high thresholds (think hundreds of users). Google Wave's unlimited participants model is most similar to a wiki, and, indeed, the document editing capabilities are more like those in a wiki than a word processor, including rudimentary basics for formatting: font color and size, headers, lists, indenting, links, and font style, for example. Though it may be possible to achieve some complex formatting by adding gadgets or linking to other sources, it's not at all intuitive.

This may change greatly as Google Wave developers experiment with new gadgets and extensions. One promising example is Igor, a Google Wave robot (or bot) developed by Nature Publishing Group. After being invited to join your wave (helpmeigor@appspot.com), the bot can help pull in and cite references from PubMed, a Connotea or CiteULike library, or a web page. Though the formatting is limited to a single style at the moment, this could be extremely useful for students and other writers who need to throw one or two references into a wave. Other bots can be used to add Twitter functionality to Wave (Tweety), create rich links to IMDb data (IMDbotty), or even convert text into 2-D barcodes (wavorizer). There are bots to create polls and task lists, to add emoticons, and much more.

Other options for collaborators who need more document editing power than Google Wave offers—but who still want to use Wave's other features—include file attachments and the embedding of Google Docs or other web-based files into a wave.

Many library staff are already out there testing Google Wave. If you are using Twitter or Facebook, chances are one of your contacts will have invitations to share. If not, a quick search for “wave invitations” should turn up some options. Once you have access, take a look at some of the library-themed public waves and test them out. To find these, search for “with:public title:library | title:libraries” from within the site. Public waves are good places to practice with Wave's features, especially if you don't have too many contacts in the system.

As Google Wave begins to gain more users and more features, libraries will undoubtedly begin experimenting with creative and innovative options. It wouldn't be a stretch to see library bots adding catalog records to a wave or library gadgets searching catalogs or opening chat channels with library staff. Google Wave's platform, though currently lacking in user-friendliness, is powerful enough to change completely how we communicate with one another.