Web Reservations International has launched the first collaborative travel booking on Google Wave.

Hostel WithMe’ application launched on Google Wave.

World’s first real-time collaborative accommodation booking tool.

Detailed information, photos as well as live availability of 24,000 hostels and other budget accommodation from Hostelworld.com

Discuss and vote on each hostel with everyone who’s going. Columbus Internet, the company behind the trip-planning applicationTravel WithMe, and Hostelworld.com, the world’s leading provider of online reservations to the budget, independent and youth travel market today announced the launch of Hostel WithMe, the world’s first real-time collaborative accommodation booking application.

Hostel WithMe utilizes Hostelworld.com‘s vast inventory of properties in 180 countries, which each include detailed descriptions of the facilities and high-quality photos. Live availability and pricing information is available on all the accommodation presented and a link is provided to allow secure credit-card booking. Google Maps and Google Streetview are also integrated so users can check out the location and area surrounding their accommodation.

When several people are using Hostel WithMe simultaneously, and one of them views an accommodation, this is visible to all the others in real-time. If the accommodation is potentially suitable, it can be added to a shortlist of proposals, which each person can comment or vote on.

Hostel WithMe is also an ideal tool for organizing travel for a group. The organizer can identify appropriate accommodation in advance, and then submit a list of proposed accommodations to the group for commenting and voting. For the first time, the 89 percent of people who don’t travel alone (only 11 percent do) can use the internet to conveniently make joint decisions on their accommodation.

Hostel With Me is provided as a gadget within Google Wave. Google Wave account holders can find Hostel WithMe in the Google Wave Extensions Gallery or go to www.goo.gl/GPFo.

Santina Doherty, VP of commercial development at Hostelworld.com, commented: “As market leaders in the budget accommodation space, Hostelworld.com is committed to innovation and the use of best-of-breed technology, which is why we’re excited to be partnering with pioneering products like the Hostel WithMe app. By allowing our product to be available through the app on Google Wave, a whole new audience can now enjoy the value and choice that is featured on Hostelworld.com.”

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A while back in January I wrote a post titled Top 10 Uses for Wave…Right Now! In that post my number one use was for coding, here was what I wrote back then:

Coding. This is my number one use case for Google Wave right now. You have got to try it. You do not need to be ocean’s apart, in fact…being in the same room right next to each other works best. Try it…you will agree with me that this is the number one…by far…best use case of Google Wave right now! Also, there are some pretty good extensions out there you might want to try. Take at look at the extension list if you want to try one or two.

Well…., now there is a really, really great extension out there…brought to you by the folks at wave-vs.net…..check it out:

I can’t tell you how happy I was to find this site. Funny enough it just showed up on my site here on Friday as a Google Ad. I clicked on it and was amazed. I find it very interesting that Google is not extoiling all about these guys on their own blogs. Also, I found it funny that the story of the day on Friday was all about how cool it would be to imbed a Wave as an iFrame! Are you kidding me! There was also some other lame post going around about live blogging with Wave that made a lot of noise on Twitter. Useless! Stupid! I really am getting very disheartened with how this being marketed and how that marketing is seemingly embraced by Google. Really missing the big boat guys!

Regardless…I definitely digress! wave-vs.net is a great leap in Google Wave extensions. These guys have taken the one thing that this technology is really, really useful for…right now…and made a excellent product that they can take to market. Yes, take to market. wave-vs.net is not free. In fact, price list ranges for $65 to $1100 EUR depending on your package. That, in my business mind, is the best news to hit Google Wave since Google I/O 09….somebody is going to make profit of this product and develop serious extensions that are very useful and will be a game-changer for those that will use it for development.

For that alone I am naming the wave-vs.net folks as our April Developer Spotlight. Congratulations guys (and girls) you have truly made a great product that will be heartly embraced by any developers who give it a try. Here is a little bit more about Wave-vs.net that I took from there website:

wave-vs.net is a Plugin to enable Pair Programming built-in Support on Core Editors and Designers in Visual Studio.Net 2008 and 2010.

Using wave-vs.net you can share Project Items and Develop together in Real-Time.

wave-vs.net Current version supports Remote Pairing for main Visual Studio Code Editors and Designers, we continue working to extend wave-vs.net capabilities.

If you are interested to know what Project Items/File Formats are enabled for Remote Pair Programming using wave-vs.net take a look on Visual Studio Integration information.

wave-vs.net does not only implements Pair Programming features. To make Pair Programming experience in Visual Studio.Net

• Federation Server Architecture for Geographycally Dispersed Setup
• Integrated Chat Client with Conference Rooms
• Wave Enabled – Pair Programming – Collaborative Development
• Major Source Control Systems Integration
• Completely Integrated in Visual Studio.Net

Do you want to see a Complete summary Feature List? go to Full Feature List.

For those of you that can’t wait to rush over to wave-vs.net and use this, please come on back and leave a comment regarding your experience with the extension. Also, feel free to leave a comment on my earlier rant if you wish.

As a disclaimer I am in no way getting any type of financial commission or royalty from this product (other then it randomly showing up as a Google Ad). I stand to gain nothing whatsoever from the developers. I am just very keen on what they are offering as I see it as truly making Google Wave better for all.

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The other day my friends over at Itensil contacted me and said they were interested in recruiting folks that would be interested in previewing an evaluation of their collaborative workflow product. I mentioned that my readers are the exact audience they are trying to reach with this product and I would be happy to post an article that called my readers to action to help out a company that is doing what I have been screaming for so very long here at The Shiny Wave – make a business workflow collaboration gadget! Which, in my mind, is the true power and promise of Wave.

So,….a little bit about the Itensil:

Itensil has developed a Wave gadget to deliver its SaaS team workflow product and is recruiting qualified business knowledge work teams for a preview evaluation.

The Collaboration Enabler includes simple, ready to use apps that guide Wave teams to:

• Develop ideas and make decisions faster and more accurately
• Create and implement action plans to achieve goals
• Capture and reuse successful team interactions and
• Bring new team members up to speed without slowing the group.

It also contains online workflow authoring and data management design tools to edit apps and create new ones.

See how it works in a 5-minute demo at www.itensil.com/demos

A limited number of free preview evaluation accounts are available to knowledge work teams that are familiar with Wave and looking for a better way to collaborate on loosely structured activities than email attachments; enjoy exploring new technologies; and willing to provide constructive feedback to the Itensil product team.

Itensil will provide online coaching and support, and special introductory pricing for evaluators who decide to adopt Collaboration Enabler. If this preview trial offer is of interest to you, please submit the form on the website (linked from the demo page) or contact Itensil by email at info@itensil.com.

Thus, if you are familiar with Google Wave (why would you be on this site if you’re not) and want to use it to do business collaboration….you are the ideal candidate and could start an evaluation immediately. Not only will you get a great product that will help you in your work, you will also be providing the team at Itensil with constructive feedback that will enhance the features of this great product.

For long time readers of this blog, this is exactly the type of product we have been waiting. An extension that truly unleashes the collaborative business power of Google Wave. The Itensil product really bring the power of web 2.0 to business. Again, if this preview trial offer is of interest to you, please submit the form on the website (linked from the demo page) or contact Itensil by email at info@itensil.com. Don’t forget to come back and leave a comment about your experience with Itensil!

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This will be my last post regarding all the different use cases of Google Wave. This is the last one because….there is a lot and if you are having trouble finding one…well, I just don’t know what to say anymore! There is, in my mind anyway, a non-ending myriad of use cases for how you can use Google Wave. But, if you are having a difficult time then this list titled The Awesome List for Google Wave 2.5 will definitely give you some ideas.

Here is how they describe the List:

Welcome!

There are so many different uses for Google Wave that the developers can’t think of all the ways to use it. Even you might be reading this wave without a clue as to how you can use Wave. So I decided to enlist all Wave users that want to share their discovered/brainstormed uses for Wave to help compile a list of uses and make it as big as possible! Awesome right? Now it’s time for the millions of Wave riders to help find new uses for this wonderful product! Let’s do this.

We are only looking for general ideas on this wave, if you want more detail in the use cases please see this wave: The Comprehensive Usage Guide to Google Wave.

They then give 76 documented uses for wave:

• Brainstorming Uses For Wave (This Wave)
• Email Replacement
• IM Replacement
• Live Forums
• Private Notes
• Role Playing Games (Text-Only or with Gadgets)
• Collaborative Book Writing (several authors writing different characters/sections in a novel/book)
• Collaborative Songwriting, Lyric Writing, Screenplays, (rhyme, thesaurus dictionary bot needed)
• Crowd-Sourced Language Proof Editing and Expert Fact Check for Fiction and Manuals
• Microblogging (Tweety and Regular Wave) (Rich microblogging as you can include files, rich formatting & have comments?)
• Blogging (With live comments and collaboration)
• Content/UI Aggregation (All your content and interfaces in one place)
• Live Meeting/Lecture Notes
• Customer Support/Relations (via Robot or live support), with collaborative FAQ as main content.
• Social Networking
• Bug Tracking
• Running and managing learning activities (Teachers)
• Auctions (listing and bidding maybe paying)
• Classifieds (listings and discussion)
• Personal Information Management (To Do Lists, Calendars, Contact Cards, etc)
• Robot Conversations
• Media Sharing (Photo galeries, YouTube, etc.)
• Live Private Or Public Wikis
• Collaborative Whiteboard
• Ticketing System (For Debuging And Tech Support)
• Coding/Pair Programming/Code Reviews (with ksyntaxy robot)
• Live Commenting Systems (for YouTube and such)
• Live Suggestion Boxes
• Flame Wars (Steph wasn’t excited about this one in the google i/o video)
• All forms of Debates
• Sports/Event Commentary
• Planning Events, Live Invitations/Meeting Requests
• Distance Learning/Meetings (Without the telepresence)
• Agenda Management
• Online Card Games like Poker (with a gadget)
• Session Discussions During Conventions – better than Tweets with hash tags
• Interactive glossary/encyclopedia
• School team projects (Writing report together, etc)
• Dynamic Newsletters (Could use Google Groups for this)
• Brainstorming
• Project planning/management
• Gaming logs for multiplayer and single player games (will need some sort of bot to post to a wave)
• Research Notes
• Board game implementations (will need dice bots, card bots and some way of representing the board)
• Wargame implementation (very similar to the one above, but further complicated by the fact that wargames would need more complex movement and line of sight implementations)
• On-the fly newsroom TELEPROMPTER (closed captioning) editing during live news broadcasts
• College/Graduate/Law School: Collaborative study group
• Last minute updates for emergency services
• Community Update Services (Non-Emergency)
• A way to discuss and create recipes
• A wave for designing GUIs (would need some sort of widget for fast prototyping)
• Artists interacting with their fans.
• Agencies introducing a product.
• Journalists constructing an article, while interacting with readers.
• Online Quiz games
• Collaborative graphic design (with client or partner)
• Spam (it’s going to happen…unfortunately)
• Collaborative analysis of chess games (archived games or real-time)
• Genealogy collaboration
• Tax Audit Collaboration
• Remote team management (business, managing employees, sales people)
• Online Town Squares to talk about current events
• Interactive Wish Lists (With Links and Pictures)
• Police manhunt
• Shopping/Grocery List
• Interactive Greeting Cards
• Education: real time feedback of student work from teacher or bot
• Travel Itinerary
• VOIP-based voice conferencing tied to a wave so you can talk real-time as you collaborate. Recording or adding audio to a wave is a different concept.
• Supervising PhD Thesis and dissertations
• Publishing and monitoring best prices
• Online press conferences
• Writing mathematics documents – requires native support for MathML and LaTeX-like dialects for inline/displayed equations and symbols [This is relatively simple to add on the server-side but would be a total game-changer for academic users. Also, requires a well thought out UI to allow code and WYSIWYG and/or handwriting of symbols]
• Lifestreaming (Special robots could be used for this)
• Intra-office memos (Vacation Requests,etc)
• Data collection for sociology and psychology using quantitative and qualitative research methods (example: Q methodology)
• Handling exceptions to structured business processes (for example Purchase to pay)
• Identifying and following up actions from balanced scoredcards/performance management solutions

This list is by no means all that there is. As I stated above I think that there is really an un-ending myriad of use cases. Thus, when I see someone Twitter that they can’t find any use for Google Wave I get this mental picture in my mind of this person that you do not want me to share.

Got an interesting use case you want to share? Are you already using Google Wave with one of the use cases above? Share your thoughts below, we love to hear your thoughts and opinions.

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If you are not familiar with Wrike.com let me start by introducing to them:

They built Wrike with the understanding of how project management is executed in small and midsize businesses.

Their Mission is to deliver the best online Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) that will let you manage your business easily via email and the Web anytime, anywhere.

To allows clients to collaborate and manage all their projects effectively.

It was great news to hear last Wednesday that they are bringing Google Wave integration to their customers, see the press release:

Starting on February 3, you’ll be able to boost your project management productivity in Wrike by adding Google Wave collaboration feature set to your project management tool. Wrike is the first project management software that allows you to manage your projects directly from Google’s communication platform.

Wrike’s Google Wave integration will allow you to seamlessly turn your waves into tasks, set due dates, update your project schedule and add your Wave discussions as comments to tasks in Wrike! This instant collaboration combination is a breakthrough in the project management space and an outstanding achievement in team productivity.

This will be a great addition to the very limited Project Management tools that was available to Google Wave users.

They offer a number of tutorials for their users: (I’ll show a couple here, but click on the links to see the others)

A.   Connect your accounts:

To connect your Google Wave account to your Wrike account, please follow these three simple steps

1. Add a new contact, wrike-wave@appspot.com, to your Wave.
2. Then create a new wave and add Wrike to it.
3. This new wave will be your Wrike task. Immediately, Wrike will respond with a request to connect your Google Wave account to your Wrike account. (That will appear in a separate wave). Once you follow this link, Wrike will recognize you and create your task in your workspace. The next time you want create a task in Wrike from your Wave account simply add Wrike to a new wave.

B.   Turn a wave into a task

If you have a wave that you want to become a task in your project, you can easily add it to your Wrike workspace. To create a task in Wrike from your Google Wave account, add Wrike to your wave. The title of your wave 1 will be your Wrike task title. The message that you added when you created your wave 2 will be added to the task description in Wrike.

If you want to update your task title or description, just use the “Edit this message” feature in Google Wave. All the updates will be automatically transferred to the task in Wrike.

Note: Due to the Google Wave API limitation, our system can only sync changes made to your tasks in the Wave, and it will not translate the updates you made to the task in your Wrike workspace to Google’s platform. So if you create a task from the Wave, make changes to the task description in Wrike, and then try to update the main wave content from Google’s platform, the changes that you made in Wrike will be lost. As soon as the limitation is eliminated by Google, this restriction will be removed.

C.   Set the due date

D.   Share a wave in Wrike

E.   Put a task into a folder

F.   Add comments to a task

The Wrike.com team also draws attention to the following for it’s users.

Note: At the moment, Google Wave API has a number of limitations that restrict Wrike’s integration functionalities. Hardworking Google developers promise to get rid of these limitations soon.

This is a great development. I hope, and fully expect to hear of more of these types of announcements. Still waiting to hear from NetDocuments who should be getting ready to announce something sometime soon. I suspect that for many developers these limitations, alluded too above, may be the reason we haven’t heard more of these types of announcements regarding integration.

How excited are you to hear about this integration? Are you a Wrike.com user? Will you become one because of this announcement?

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I have spoken about Novell Pulse and IBM’s Project Vulcan in recent posts. I have not mentioned, however, the offering from SAP called Constellation.

The idea from SAP is to have a cloud based tool called 12Sprints that will allow users to collaborate in real time. They describe the product as:

A VIRTUAL WAR ROOM

It’s not just a place where things get discussed. It’s where things get done.
Invite the right people from inside and outside your company. Bring in the pertinent data. And choose the most informed course of action with the help of pre-defined, interactive decision-making tools. Secure, hosted, real-time, collaborative decision-making. Everything you need to get everyone on the same page — finally under one roof.

Here is a video of 12Sprints:

If you would like to sign up to beta test 12Sprints you can by going to the Beta Registration Page. They provide the following instructions:

Fill out the following form to register to participate in the free SAP codename 12sprints Beta program. After registering with your email address below, we will be in contact with you shortly.

As a Beta tester, we might ask you to help us make the product better. We hope you can:

- Log onto a hosted version of the application and test out the system
- Receive occasional announcements emails
- Provide feedback and answer occasional surveys on how the application is working for you
- Participate in occasional web conferences and online discussion groups

Benefits of being a Beta tester:

- Use the platform for free during the Beta
- Help drive the development and design process

SAP has also indicated that they will be offering this product as an applicance that can be set-up and reside locally to allow for an INTRANET cloud vice an INTERNET cloud….thus, keeping your data more secure and contained within your INTRANET.

So, by my count that makes three (big-time) competitors to that we have spoken about here on this site. At least in the enterprise domain, and we haven’t even mentioned PBWorks or MindTouch (oops…guess we just did). This space is starting to get pretty busy and crowded. It is going to be very interesting to see how it all shakes out over the next year.

In the mean time, I will keep signing up to test drive these Betas as I am really just concerned is seeing this technology advance as far and as fast as possible.

What do you think of Constellation and 12Sprints? Have you signed up to be a Beta tester?

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co-founder, Mr. Lars Rasmussen gave a presentation and interview at TechFest 2010 in Bombay, India last week.

After his presentation he gave an interview to Only Gizmos where he talked about , Google Maps and his move from entrepreneur to Google employee. It was a very interesting interview, is only about 6 mins long and worth watching in its entirety.

He comments regarding IBM’s Project Vulcan was very interesting. It sounded to me that they were taken a little by surprise by this product. Lars indicated they had talked with IBM, but not particularly about Project Vulcan. However, I agree with him that we do not need multiple protocols in this field. Thus, I hope that future talks between IBM’s Project Vulcan team and the Google Wave team will lead so some sort of agreement on a joint way forward that will allow the two to co-exist and interact.

I was happy to hear that working on making more like email (i.e. have a Cc and Bcc functionality) is low on the list of priorities. Frankly, I hope they are working round the clock on nothing else but Google Apps integration.

Lastly, they have reported on Only Gizmos that during the speech Mr. Rasmussen announced that the Google Wave invites would soon come to an end and that they were looking to offer multi-language support in . They say:

While most of the actual lecture didn’t quite reveal anything substantially new, he did let the audience know that Google was working on about 40 languages for Wave- and proceeded with a demo for the same. He also let slip that the Wave invite process would come to a halt in a few months- anyone can then sign up for Wave on the website.

However, the most important part, I think, is that they will be talking with IBM regarding Project Vulcan and how the two will be able to interface together. With IBM and Novell now firmly entrenched in this area the window for Google to carve out the enterprise footprint is rapidly closing. They are going to have to “WOW’ again with Google Apps integration. I think Novell and IBM will have clear business models and marketing strategy on their product going forward. I hope Google will also.

I have advocated for a long time here on this blog that the real benefit for is in the workplace. I think the malaise you hear from the general population towards only emphasis’ that assertion. It’s real power and the no-brainer problem that solves is real-time workplace collaboration. Novell and IBM are presenting that…very effectively, I might add. Google is trying to define it as all things for all people. It may be…in the future. But, for now, concentrate on marketing it and developing it as a real-time workflow collaboration tool. That, in my mind, is the only market that will be profitable.

Now, I may be proven wrong. I hope I am. In fact, Google has a lot of really smart people working for them that probably have lots of great ideas on how this will make them a gazillion dollars down the line. But, the enterprise model for is a no-brainer and if they get by-passed in this market it will be unforgivable.

As always, please share your thoughts on this post. What do you think of Project Vulcan? What do you think about no more invites?

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Last week at Lotosphere 2010, IBM announced Project Vulcan which Ed Brill, IBM chief of product management for Lotus software, describes as:

IBM Project Vulcan is not a brand-new effort.  It builds on the existing capabilities, and represents the future versions of, the IBM Lotus product portfolio — including Notes.  One of its key themes is social analytics and business analytics combined and applied to industry-specific scenarios — making collaboration more focused and relevant.  The vision of Project Vulcan intends to deliver collaboration across company boundaries; make it easy to deploy the technology; and include developer-friendly services and APIs.

Moreover, Mr. Brill says that:

Project Vulcan is the blueprint for where Lotus Notes is going.  We’ll continue to support your existing Notes apps — we have for 20 years, it only makes sense to continue — but we’ll add these loosely-coupled services to bring in more value, attention, and focus.  Project Vulcan gives us a structure for innovation, for delivering on that next leap forward in collaboration and productivity.

During their mini-keynote address, Ed Brill, director of product management for Lotus Software, and Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president of messaging and collaboration, said the Notes entry point to Vulcan comes in 2011 after the 8.5.2 release.

So we now have a new player on the scene offering a collection of business collaboration tools. Moreover, IBM is taking a page from Google and offering the ability for developers to sign up at the LotusLive Labs website. Project Vulcan is scheduled to be available in beta on the LotusLive Labs in the second half of 2010. I have already signed up and am really looking forward to getting my “invite”. Obviously, IBM is hoping that the LotusLive Labs preview of Project Vulcan will offer some of the similar hype that Google Wave experienced. Moreover, some valuable user feedback.

Similar to what we wrote about Novell Pulse it becomes clear that Google must announce their business solution soon. Even if it just as IBM has done – Saying this is the direction we are developing toward. If they do not, they are risking that others that already have a larger footprint in the business area then they do will start to define that space before (and for) them. Thus, folks will be getting excited about what is to come from them and not about where Google is going with Google Wave.

I think  Novell Pulse and Project Vulcan is exciting and I can hardly wait to see those products and play with them. But, I would love hear from Google about their vision of how they see Google Wave, Google Voice and Google Apps all fitting together in the future…and when they think that future will be.

What do you think about this announcement from IBM? Will you be signing up in the LotusLive Labs and be giving Project Vulcan a try? Leave your thoughts below.

photos by Fabio Pignatti

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I find it very interesting how the big three in the IT industry currently conduct their business. Well, that is not interesting, but the complete difference in the ways they conduct their business and develop products is very interesting. All have their merits, as all three of these companies are wildly successful. Of course, I’m talking about Google, Apple and Microsoft. Let’s take a more in-depth look at how they seem to develop and roll-out their product lines.

Microsoft

Microsoft is the business king. Their enterprise suite of products are crazy popular and pretty much dominate that market space. Their most successful products would be MS Office, SharePoint, Server, Exchange and System Center Suite (not to mention SQL server, VB Suite, etc). Yet, for all the reasons I like Microsoft and those products just mentioned,the reason those products are successful is precisely the reason I am not a fan of the Windows OS (which by the way, causes problems in the enterprise area for MS if the OS problems tarnish the enterprise line).

In the enterprise line MS constantly is working with businesses on how to improve this product line, what other features do you want, what other use cases does this line need to support, etc, etc. It works very well. You get a product that can pretty much do what it is you need it to do. There is a whole administrative tail that comes with these products from certification courses, to…MS sponsored working groups in  your area, to…MS experts and business consultants that will help you architect how to use those products optimally. This product line is all about feedback, lessons learned and big service releases or product releases that address both that feedback and those lessons learned. Very, very much akin to a normal business model. Very comfortable model to business as it speaks about doing things to their products in the same way as business itself works.

However, applying that same model to the OS makes for a very bloated product. MS really needs to get back to basis with this product (I think  may be  a step in that direction) so that terrible frustration folks have with the OS does not tarnish the business line. But, this is their model, they are proud of it, it is the central theme of the Win 7 advertising campaign. Everybody gets a say and we listen to everybody and then…we build a product that will do everything.

Apple

You want to talk about opposites! Apple, probably does user research (of that I have no doubt), but if anybody at Apple ever talked about it they would surely be fired that day. Apple tells you what you need and then they deliver it. You wish the  could send meeting requests…buy something else, we don’t do that.

What they do, however, is give a product that does the things it does very well (I think that sentence makes sense). It will look cool, it will function as advertised and it will be integrated with the other core Apple products. You will not know about this product (outside of the rumours) until release. You get what you get. They tell you what it does and the reason it does it that way.

This model is clearly not designed to entice the enterprise customer. This is all about the personal consumer. Apple is about product. Making sure you have the current and the next hot product. Once you don’t…you fall off the radar and your profits also fall with it. When you have so much invested in the success of that next product you have make sure you have tight integration with your other products. If everything you makes works great together, why wouldn’t I buy everything you make.

Apple hit a home run with the iPod and then again with the iPhone. The tight integration of those products with the Mac line helped grow those products. The growth of the Mac line grew the software line, etc, etc. We will see another test of this model at the end of the month when the, much rumoured, Tablet computer (or whatever) is launched. I for the life of me cannot think of a good use case to justify buying this product. But Apple has apparently come up with one. They have built a product that will solve a problem I am not aware I have yet, they will tell me how their product solves it and then integrate that product in with their other lines. Will I buy what is presented to me…we’ll see.

They do this very well. They tell you what you need, they build it their way, it does what they say it can do and not do, they make it cool and make sure it works with all their other stuff. Your feedback….you get to make that at the checkout, that’s it.

Google

Google, which is primarily a web-based product line tends to lean toward fast roll-out of products that still need development. The product is open-source and encourages everybody to join in, try it and develop it further with extensions and apps that support and make that product better. They provide a whole bunch of open-source code to help everyone get started. Thus, they have another product to deliver their real business – search engine and ads.

This model has worked great in the past with Gmail, Google Maps and to some extent Google Apps. However, the idea that this works good for a product like  is yet to be seen. They took a little bit of the Apple model. They went far, far away to a secret island and designed the product without letting anyone find out about it and had a big huge launch. Then they took the MS approach and asked everybody to think of what they wanted improved and what new functionality they would like to see.

I am not sure if this will be successful.  is both a business and a personal tool…so, maybe taking what works from both MS and Apple is a good idea. I just have a real feeling that Wave (in my mind) is more of a business tool and, thus, really needs to be tight before roll-out and seriously solve a specific problem that business has. That big problem (by the way) is the easy one, real-time collaborative workflows! But, because it is (or certainly can be) a serious business tool they need a lot of the admin tail that supports business process (certification, architectural experts or consultants, appliance, etc) needs to be available. Moreover, in the same way that MS OS can tarnish the enterprise line so too can bad press and reviews about the preview of Google Wave hurt any enterprise aspirations.

On the personal side of the house they need to have more integration with their other products. Not available yet, hopefully soon. Similar to the way Apple makes all their products work well together,  needs to also work well with all their other products: Gmail (contacts & groups, Android, Apps, Voice, Blogger, YouTube, etc. That is a must for the consumer side and what will make it successful. The first thing out of everyone’s mouth with Google Wave is….”Does it work with(insert your favourite Google product).”

The come on over, try it and help build it has been extremely successful for Google and has gotten a lot of folks very, very excited about their products (read – this blog ). However, this product (as they have realized I think by the way they are trying to merge the best examples of what makes Apple and MS successful) is a mix of everything. So, perhaps incorporating the business model of MS, Apple and Google is the right road to be on.

Time will tell. I hope that this will be wildly successful but for that to happen they need to realize that they need the best of what has made Google successful, the best of what has made MS successful and the best of what makes Apple successful. Doing any part of that trinity half-hearted or with less enthusiasm will be to the detriment of the whole product.

Which model do you think is the best fit for Google Wave going forward? We love to hear what you think.

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I have seen a lot of tweets, posts and comments regarding what you can actually use the preview version of for…right now! Any posts that I have read on the subject seem to always focus on what you will be able to use for in the future. These have also concentrated on extensions that are not even released to everyone yet.

I am going to give a list of things you can do with today that you will find useful. There is some excellent examples out there of some very promising extensions…like Gravity….but it is not available to everyone yet. In fact, most extensions are not very useful and need more developing….as Daniel Graverson wrote in his excellent post Google Wave Gadgets Lack Quality. So, for that reason I am not going to talk too much about the extensions that are available to help you with these use cases. You can decide yourself if you want to bring in some of these extension to make your Wave more productive.

But,  here is my Top 10 Uses for Google Wave…Right Now!:

10. Inserting a Wave into your Blog. Many folks have done this and it works pretty good. If you want to give this a try you may want to think about a post topic that you want folks to collaborate on and build. Try to think beyond just using it for comments. I think it is best suited for an event post. Take note however, everybody needs to have a Google Wave account to see the post.

9. Public Wave Discussion. Do you have a topic that you are particularly interested in. Start a public Wave on the subject and you will get many others who will join in and start to take part in the conversation. Many may be just as passionate, or more passionate, on the subject as you. Make sure you do a public search first to see if that Wave topic has already been started.

8. Role Playing Game. This has been an area that has turned out to be a lot of fun for folks and has had a pretty good following. Moreover, there is some useful extensions that have been written for RPGs. See the post I wrote titled Google Wave + RPGs = Excellent Experience! on the subject to get involved.

7. Conference Waving. This is usually something that the conference would initiate usually. But if you find they haven’t. Maybe approach them the first day and indicate you want to start one and ask them to announce it so others at the conference would then join in.

6. Waving your own event. Perhaps you may want to set up a Wave to allow on-line users to attend you event. I plan to give this a try for our next hack-a-thon we will be having on Google Chrome Extensions. I am going to play with streaming video via wave or recording and then up-loading to the Wave.

5. Meetings. Google Wave is an excellent way to get folks together for a meeting that they can’t get together in person for. There are some telecom extension you can try. But they won’t work with everyone, so you may want to test them out before relying on them. I have had two Wave meetings  and both times we had a telecom going to support the on-line portion. We used Google Wave to work on something that we could change while talking via telecom. It was great and those involved thought it was a great, time-saving, efficient way to work on a something together…in our slippers.

4. Small Document Collaboration. Although Google Wave does not have document collaboration…right now. You can do some small collaboration efforts which you can cut and paste into your document application of choice. I would not recommend doing anything greater than 10-15 pages. Once you try this you find that you become very impatient for some real document collaboration ability to be added…because you will very much enjoy the experience.

3. Minutes. I have used it twice now in a meeting where I and three others collaborated on the minutes. It was a great experience. If you missed something, somebody else picked it up and we had some real kick-#%@ minutes that did not need anymore work once the meeting was finished.

2. Event Planning. For any of you involved in groups that have events you hold. Planning your agenda with your group on Google Wave is a great, great use of the application. I have done it now for 4 different groups & events I am involved with and it has been a great experience. You will find it quick. One word of advice is that you give the Wave a time-limit. I.E. no more comments/revisions accepted after (insert your date), for folks that maybe don’t check their Wave on a regular basis. I will talk about a way to help eliminate this below. Moreover, from this same Wave you do all the coordination for the event with folks. It really is a great way to do all the agenda and co-ordination planning for an event.

1. Coding. This is my number one use case for Google Wave right now. You have got to try it. You do not need to be ocean’s apart, in fact…being in the same room right next to each other works best. Try it…you will agree with me that this is the number one…by far…best use case of Google Wave right now! Also, there are some pretty good extensions out there you might want to try. Take at look at the extension list if you want to try one or two.

Once you start using for these types of uses you will find that it is kind of annoying if you don’t have some kind of notifier to let you know when your Wave got updated. I recommend the Google Wave Notifier for PC and WaveBoard for Mac to give you notification of an update to your Wave.

Are you using for something that is not on the list…right now! Let us know about how your using it below. Or, simply comment on the on the list if you are using it in some of what is listed. Or, god forbid, you don’t agree with the list.

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One of the most anticipated releases (in  world anyhow) for 2010 will be Novell Pulse™. Which, they claim will work seamlessly with  so you, your colleagues and partners can get down to business in realtime.

If you are not familiar with the Novell Pulse™ product you should watch the video below:

Novell™, if you are not familiar, are the makers of ™, ™ and…….big contributors and supporters of ™! That is a big deal. If they can get ™ working well in Pulse™ and if Google™ can get Google Apps working well in  and they are working together to get Pulse™ and  to “work seamlessly” then it will really be a big deal when it is finally announced. They did mention the first half of 2010 which coincides nicely with Google I/O 2010.

The interesting part about this is that Novell™ is a serious business provider. Moreover, their quote regarding security for Pulse in the press release is encouraging:

“Security and identity management remain top concerns for enterprise companies considering real-time, social solutions,” said Caroline Dangson, Research Analyst, Enterprise Collaboration and Social Solutions at IDC. “Novell has a proven record in security and identity management, which is an important strength it brings to its new collaboration platform, Novell Pulse. Novell’s interoperability with Google Wave is another interesting application of its new collaboration platform in supporting mixed IT environments and demonstrates Novell’s strategy toward real-time, social sharing and collaboration.”

Novell has decided that the business for them in the future will be collaborative business solutions. See the latest powerpoint presention on the subject given by Richard Lindstedt of Novell, Inc:

For me, however, it is not clear just how close these two are working together. I’m not clear at all how serious Google™ is about the business apps end of Google Wave™ or, are they just trying to make something that transplants Twitter™ and Facebook™ (fat chance of that, btw). The problem that Google™ will have with the business end of things is that Novell™, it seems, is going to have a running head start. Pulse™ is not trying to be anything but  for business, and, from the video above, I think they are clearly on the right track. Perhaps OpenOffice™ and Google Apps™availability in  will be simultaneous at I/O 10. Not sure how that benefits Novell™. So, you see…I am not convinced that these two are working very tightly together on the business apps side of the house. Perhaps they are only working together on Federation, but no further.

Regardless, for me Novell Pulse™ will be a much anticipated release. Hopefully I will be right about I/O 10…as you know I plan on attending and expect (or want) big  news. In their press release they state:

Novell Pulse will be generally available in the first half of 2010 in a cloud deployment, and with an on-premise deployment option in a subsequent release.

The on-premise appliance will be very big news. It will essentially be a Enterprise Wave appliance for your INTRANET. Very exciting.

Oh almost forgot…..Hello….Hello, Microsoft™ are you still out there….what are you doing in this space?

As always, please share your thoughts below. We love to hear your thoughts!

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