Want to know how you’ll be working in two years? Watch this video
June 21, 2009 –Last year, for June’s Online Community Month, the focus was on citizenship and the future of modern society. This year what I’m finding most interesting is how we’ll be working in a progressively networked future. Online collaboration has always been difficult. Computing — a decidedly solitary activity — isn’t easily turned into a communal experience. But after watching this video I see a glimmer of a long-distance working community that’s truly more productive than one sitting in adjoining cubicles. It’s a preview of the open source Google Wave.
Google describes a wave as, “Equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.” Here’s the video:
This video is a full hour long, so let me help you with a couple pivotal features.
-
- Google Wave allows users to extend real-time conversations onto whatever they’re working — a web site (such as a blog, in this example), a web-based document or anything else that’s uploaded and shared.
-
- The open source APIs that Google is allowing developers to create sharing methodologies limited only to the imagination of the developers. Here you see a simple example of how two collaborators can work with the same photo set in real time, to make selections, modifications and supporting comments.
The developers who will be taking and running with this new system will be setting the limits for how we all work together in the next decade. Just as apropos to Online Community Month, they’ll be doing this development in a spirit of true collaboration: open source and forever free to be tweaked and refined.
Tags: collaboration, Google Wave, open source
Posted in Online Community Month, Productivity | 2 Comments »
June 26th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Yes yes YES!!! Go go google gadget collaboration! This is going to double productivity of teams that choose to use it.
I am jumping up and down! This is what I wanted Microsoft Groove to be years ago, but no one adopted it. Wave will totally catch on though because it’s in the browser.
History will see this as the most significant contribution to the internet since the graphical web browser back in the early 90s.
(p.s. LOL – my CAPCHA word is “WAVE”)
June 26th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Thanks for the affirmation, Tim. I’ve been wrong before — often spectacularly — when trying to predict the future. But this feels right. Anyone disagree? Have more information?