Since Google took on its first 100,000 public beta testers, the Internet has been awash in a wave of Google Wave interest. Some people have even tried to buy or sell Google Wave preview accounts on eBay!
Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has an in-depth first look at Google Wave that examines its various features. Wave comes off as a fancier version of EtherPad (which I covered here), incorporating instant messaging, e-mail, and a number of other features.
Robert Scoble thinks Google Wave is overhyped and will actually lead to “unproductivity.” However, Mark Milian on the Los Angeles Times Blog thinks that Google Wave has the potential to “transform journalism” into a more collaborative process.
You may notice that double bylines aren’t very common. That’s because trying to co-author a news story stinks.
The process usually involves one reporter talking to and researching a few things and another following a different set of sources and finally combining their findings toward the end. This can result in a mess of incompatible and unrelated research that gets either thrown out or somewhat-awkwardly wiggled in.
I find it interesting how much this echoes what I have discovered in writing fiction with EtherPad.
The process of writing a story together, with characters owned by respective authors, used to be a morass of writing half the dialogue and sending it back and forth for insertion of respective characters’ words, or writing it ourselves and hoping our lack of famliarity with the other person’s character didn’t lead to us making them act out of character.
With EtherPad (and, presumably, with Google Wave), collaborative fiction writing becomes akin to an act of structured role-playing, where we actually write together at the same time—and unlike normal role-playing, if we decide something came off wrong we can easily go back and tweak it.
Of course, I’m not in the Google Wave trial yet—but I can hardly wait to try it out.
