Doing the Wave

Over the past week I have been doing the Wave. Not the strange little crowd behavior often seen at sporting events, but using Google's new Wave product now in "Preview"mode.

Now before you get all excited about checking out Wave, please note it is by invitation only and I have no invitations to give out.

So why am I even telling you about Wave, well because it pretty amazing technology and it appears to have some interesting disruptive possibilities.

I guess the best way to describe it is too say if email, IM and Twitter/Yammer/Facebook were to get together and have an off-spring, it might be Wave.

The product provides threaded multi-party conversations that provide for simultaneous, near real-time updates. The first time you watch multiple people update a Wave (Google speak for a threaded conversation) at the same time you will be hooked and want to figure out the possibilities.

Of course, all of this chaos, can be confusing at times, especially because it not sequential as people can insert, remove, edit or reply to any part of the thread at any time. There are tools that let you deal with this by looping through the updates (via the space bar) or "play back" the Wave in case you came in late to the wave and what to figure out how things got to the point of where they are now.

All of this would be cool, but the fact that like Facebook, Wave is its own world, it features add-in functionality, called Gadgets and Robots. This extensibility already provides a number of very nice features such as on the fly translation from one language to another, to polling to Google Maps and because it has its own API, many more extensions will be coming to Wave (I wish my company's products had as many extensions as Wave already has).

In my first week on Wave I have participated in Waves that have shared a YouTube video, allowing all participants to watch and comment on the video at the same time; a Wave that allowed all of the participants to place a push pin on a Google Map where their office is located (and comment about it) allowing many of the participants to learn more about their company then most of the HR programs we have seen (no offense to my companies fine HR department). Finally, today 28 Wave participants, who are also employees of my company, participated in a Wave during our CEO's live Webinar. Don't worry nothing proprietary was shared, but folks did react to what was being said and shared content for folks that were not able to attend (the Webinar is offered multiple times and recorded for later play back), but with Wave the opportunity to share in real-time was pretty amazing.

There are plenty of rough edges with Wave at this point, but the early adopters lucky enough to get invites are enjoying the experience. In fact, a poll in one of the Waves shows 22 will use it when it comes out of preview mode, 0 will not use it and 10 others voted maybe.

I vote to keep using it and share with the Technology Plumbing readers how they can use it to help their companies.

New Ideas for Your Office - Where ever it is

Offices today tend to be what you make of them and where you can make them. So to make your office, where ever it is as productive and useful as possible I wanted to share a few products that have caught my eye recently.

BlueLounge has a neat (OK, showing my age with that word, but it does keep things neat) cable holder that can be "stuck" to your desk and hold your cable ends in place ready for you to use. Should minimize the "cable crawl" where you have to crawl around on the floor looking for that iPod cable.

Belkin (a Technology Plumbing favorite) has a nice clamp-on Surge Protector to help manage your power cords by clamping the power strip to your desk. Notice a trend in these ideas of managing wires and cables, true wireless connectivity can't come soon enough :)

I am a big white board fan, but the cost and difficulty of getting and mounting white boards with enough space to work on can be difficult. This brings is to IdeaPaint, which takes the idea of a white board and extends it to your entire room (or at least the walls you want to use). Instead of mounting one or more white boards, you simply apply IdeaPaint to the area you want to use as a write-able surface. This idea is in use at many corporations (including my own), but IdeaPaint brings this concept to the small business or home office where it can be used for both work and family matters. When needed, simply paint over it with either another coat of IdeaPaint or a more traditional wall covering.

Combine these new products with basics of a good office, like a good chair, good lighting and a work surface that positions your work area at the right height will make your "office" work for you and not just be just a place you work.