If you’d like to know more about what Google Wave is and how it can be used, I’d start with this article on wave from Mashable.

In the name of experimentation and generally liking to play with new tech, I proudly engaged with Google Wave for a few projects… after a 6 month trial period (wow, how time flies) I report my findings and feelings… please add your thoughts in comments:

After the initial “testing wave 1 2 3” waves, I was involved in 3 projects, who all wanted to use wave as a form of communication/co-ordination – great, some real tests!

Project #1 – never got off the ground on wave, one of the participants rarely used anything other than his mobile and wave “doesn’t officially support any mobile platforms yet, but if you are feeling adventurous, you can try out Google Wave on Android phones, or on the iPhone.” – I tried, it failed (android 1.6)… he tried (Safari on iPhone) and failed. Dead in the water.

Project #2 – the aim for this one was a bit different, to use it more as an evolving document, outlining the project with waves covering sub topics – it required some interaction with other documents and this is where this one fell over. “Drag and drop” of documents? I’ve never got it to work, so we had to rely on linking to Google docs or other sources online which isn’t really the same. Again as time carried on, we moved to email and notes within a Google doc. Perhaps I’m missing something here, could something like Socialwok help?

Project #3 – Bar CampBournemouth planning – the one success, of sorts. Its worked pretty well for coordinating our efforts to organise #bcbomo2, once everyone had an account (luckily 2 of us had some spare invites) it grew and evolved as expected. The 2 things that weren’t great were:
1) It got a bit too large quite quickly, finding the right sub-waves/topics was difficult and it needed a trim to become more manageable – for corporate use I think I’d have a policy on what does and does not go within a wave (ie no off topic or “chat”).
2) Success was quite dependent on people checking the wave.

General findings and some tips:

Initially I think the biggest failure was to not have email notifications of new blips – there was an app you could add to a wave to do this, although now it’s a feature that is built in. This was the one that nearly sunk our BarCamp Bournemouth planning wave – you had to check if there were updates… rather than being nudged when there were.

I’ve also noticed times when having wave open has had a detrimental affect on performance of my PC, I’m using Firefox (not tried crome or IE) on an XP in my office, my laptop is Vista and my studio PC is a high powered audio PC running XP – all have had the same issue with it generally taking a lot of memory (I suspect), closing the wave tab has in all cases rectified the issue. Hopefully this is just a bug.

If you have more than 2 people in a wave typing/making updates in can really slow down to the point where you are waiting for it to catch up with the words you have typed, which is frustrating.

Some people have also claimed to hate the fact you can’t jump to the new “blips” within a wave… well, like Obama, yes you can. Click into the wave and press spacebar, it’ll jump to the next unread message.

All in all, it is still a beta and I do see potential benefits to a system like wave… would I use it again? Maybe.

Love to know your thoughts/top tips

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Big thank you to C4L and Fibreband our main sponsors of BarCamp Bournemouth 2.

If you haven’t signed up to come along… why not?

** Sign up for BarCampBournemouth2 here **

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2 important dates for your diary:

1) Meetdraw 5 “So Meety” is being held at Bar So on Thursday 18th March from 6:30pm. Everyone is welcome whether you work for an agency, in-house team, freelance or currently studying. A great event to meet and network with fellow tech/web people locally.

and…

2) BarCamp Bournemouth 2 – April 10/11th at Bournemouth University, a 2 day self-organising un-conference – for anyone interested in tech/web stuff.

My quick effort at an FAQ:

What is a BarCamp? Its a 2 day event, starting at 930am and going right through till 4pm on the sunday – turn up, give a talk if you want to (or not if you don’t) and learn from/discuss with / laugh at people in the tech community. (see wikipedia or barcamp.org)

Is that something to do with drinking? – No… not really… but yes, the bar will be open and used as one of the discussion spaces.

What went on at BarCamp Bournemouth 1? Lots of stuff… my highlights are here.

More info and stuff coming on the website soon – if you’d be interested in part sponsoring Bar Camp, please drop me a line – you’ll get space on the website,a logo on the Uni TV (from now till event) etc etc

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The trend for pointless Facebook pages continues, with lots of “million people who love custard” or statements as pages “Sitting in the bath” – they grow very well virally and rapidly, but what’s the point?

Well…. I’ve noticed a new trend on Facebook recently – a lot of groups, aiming to build a million+ users, follow a formula generally as follows:

1. Create a largely pointless page as above, the more controversial/amusing/”so true” the better.
2. Seed the group to your circle and watch it grow virally (hopefully).
3. Once large enough, add favourite pages for the actual business/person that they were hoping to promote and update to all the fans – sometimes related, usually not.

If 1% of 1,000,000 fans checked out the real target, you’ve just created a huge amount of traffic to try and convert.

It’s clever, but not necessarily very ethical – I guess it’s the Facebook “bait n switch”. Maybe I should of called it “grey hat” (a term stolen from SEO) as it’s not really specifically against the Facebook TOS?

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There’s a few questions that always pop up when I speak, I’m going to tackle one of them today following a discussion I took place in over the weekend:

What’s the right mix for status updates (or tweets)?

I’d summarise it as the following:

• Frequency
• Relevance
• Personality
• Purpose
• Consistency

All of these are underpinned by the central question you should ask yourself – what do the people following me, who subscribe to these updates expect?

I sometimes see status updates, used for two different things, when really they should use two streams or types of resource.

A good example of this was the event that prompted the discussion, a bar in Bournemouth began posting every record played, as it happened.

• Some people loved it.
• Some people hated it so much they sent abusive messages to the bar.
• Most people were either indifferent, or switched off without saying anything.

Then the bar apologised… and the usual war of words/trolls began, but it was this bit that stood out for me:

A: “If you don’t like the updates unfollow”

B: “I want updates, just not a flood of them!”

A valued follower, taking the time to say “less updates” – I wish I could look back, or measure how many people either unfollowed or hid updates from this bar – it’d be very interesting numbers.

Anyway, the moral for me is – horses for courses – there is a place for the track-listing high frequency type updates, but maybe it wasn’t the same as the general stream – is that true for your business?

Listen to what your customers/users/followers tell you, with an eye on the quiet many – in the case above, the silent majority and the smallest minority that commented negatively were the voices that needed to be heard and not those of the vocal supporters (who interestingly mostly came round to the 2 stream idea, after I proposed it).

Have consistency with how/when/why you tweet/blog/update – occasional changes (like if you’re at a conference) can be accepted, of course.

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