Maybe Hip – Blogs Internet Television

For OR Against: The Google Wave

Maybe Hip just took their first swim in the Google Wave last night and the water was nice.  For those who don’t know what the Wave is, at its simplest form it is an instant messenger that you can add pictures, videos and audio into.  But that explanation doesn’t give it anywhere near the justice it deserves.  Here are a handful of things that the wave does.

• embed video and audio – no more links in the message to a website, you can put a movie trailer right in the wave.
• you can also embed the entire wave into your website.  So if a company had a meeting using the wave they can put it up on their site for everyone to see
• you can keep coming back to the wave – it saves like a document
• If you want to know exactly how the conversation went down, you can hit play and it is like watching it all over again.
• You can go back and edit anything you said or anything that someone else said.
• People can make apps, including anything like a polling app to a game of chess.
• you don’t have to attach a file to share it, just drop it into the wave and it is there for everyone.
• you type in real time, when you hit a letter they see a letter, so there is no lag time in the conversation.

These are only some of the uses for Google Wave and being open sourced I am sure people will figure out more and more ways to use it everyday.  We used it for the first time while having a marketing meeting.  It was great anytime anyone had an idea, or found a site, or found an artist that they liked, we could immediately see what they were seeing.  We also had the newest SNL Digital Short embedded at the top, which kept getting played the whole meeting.

The best part is now anytime we have more ideas we can just go back to the Wave and add it.  Then when someone else checks on it the new content will be outlined.  It seemed to cut down on so much of the work.  I think the key is to remember to use it instead of sending 20 emails back and forth.

I will be giving away my invites when I get them to my twitter followers.  So if you would like an invite when I have them you can follow me at twitter/patricklothian. Until then I will update you if there is anything really cool I find.  Maybe I will embed a Wave into one of my posts.
Patrick Lothian