Google unveiled its Google Wave communication tool in May this year. Google Wave has been described as being “how email would look if it was invented yesterday” and brings together email, social networks, wikis and instant messaging to create a real-time collaborative environment.

To test the open-source environment, Google invited thousands of users to trial the product and supply feedback. A “wave”, according to Google, is “equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more.” Waves can also be shared and are live – participants can see transmissions as they are being typed.

“Email essentially mimics snail mail,” according to engineer Lars Rasmussen in Google Wave’s launch video. “Wave, by contrast, starts out with the definition of a conversation…and instead of thinking of individual messages as being sent back and forth we think of the entire conversation object as being a shared object being shared on a server somewhere.”

Making Waves

One organisation trialling Google Wave in the UK is Dogs Trust. The charity’s digital team has been using Google Wave since early October.

“Internally we have used [Google Wave] to create collaborative documents such as reports, a survey and to discuss things,” Dogs Trust’s digital marketing manager Jacqui Darlow explained. “We have just found out that people in our other centres have access too and so that opens up the possibility of generating things such as press releases a lot quicker than using email.”

Darlow told NMK that the group had set up a Dogs Trust account and offered invitations to other charities only, the aim being to try and find out what charities can do with Google Wave and learn from each other.

So has the experience been a positive or negative one?

“It’s hard to say, so far for us it’s been a bit of a novelty and at times a distraction,” Darlow said. “Once the initial excitement of having something no one else did wore off we seemed to not visit it as much. Partly as talking to yourself or colleagues on yet another platform can be a bit tiring, but it is nice to be able to discuss things with those we know through other networks in more detail.”

Darlow said that that the fact that participants could see what others were writing as they were typing may force people to think twice before keying in responses. But will Dogs Trust continue to use Google Wave?

“We are not developers and we are waiting for the developer that creates the app that makes us go ‘ah that’s what we can use wave for’,” she said. “It may be a Twitteresque type of system that we leave for a while and then get dragged back to when it becomes more mainstream.”