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Re:Apache open sourcers welcome Google's unwanted Wave by edanm on Wednesday November 24, 2010 @08:51AM (#1937294)
We use Wave in our 3-person team (and very seldom, for outside contacts).

Forgot whatever you heard about what Wave is supposed to be. It's only a tool for small project collaboration.

Here's our use: a new Wave for anything we need to talk about, which is its own subject (e.g., talking about a specific feature for a project.) In that wave, anybody who wants to say anything just adds more messages. For some things, the topmost Wave contains a "summary" of everything said. For example, we have a "Schedule" Wave where we write our schedule. The top Wave contains the actual schedule and is hand-edited whenever we need, and additional messages are added to discuss anything that needs discussing.

This is great for collaboration. Any time I want to add more information to a subject, I add a message. If there's something I need to edit (a list of clients, etc.), I can edit any Wave I want. It works perfectly with multiple people editing anything they want, even at the same time. It even works for real-time talking, which helps if you happen to be updating the Wave at the same time.

All in all, if you completely forget what Wave was supposed to be and only use it for small-team collaboration, I think it's a great tool.

Re:Apache open sourcers welcome Google's unwanted Wave by eftpotrm on Wednesday November 24, 2010 @09:16AM (#1937359)
How is this different from a basic forum with an 'edit post' button available to all? I've never used Wave so I'm not trying to be funny, just genuinely curious.
Re:Apache open sourcers welcome Google's unwanted Wave by edanm on Wednesday November 24, 2010 @10:05AM (#1937522)
Mainly, because it's a much better interface in every way.

You've got search (that works) for Waves, multiple editing at once is done really well (with colors for different people), seeing who added Waves works great, seeing what people edited works great.

Not to say that there aren't problems. There are tons of usability issues. But it's still the easiest way for a group of 3 people to keep each other informed of project status, etc. At least, easiest that I've tried (and admittedly, I haven't tried too many such tools.)