Waiting on the Wave

October 6, 2009 by Isaac

I'm not really into social media. I've never really found it all that useful. However, I must say that I see a serious use case for using Google Wave. The part that interests me is document collaboration. For example, one thing I'd use Wave for is requirements document collaboration. Currently, the requirements document is posted as a Word file and then all the stakeholders grab a copy and either mark up the document or email comments. It is painful to then take all those comments and documents and merge them back together.

Using Wave we would post a requirements document. Then, since it is possible to start a conversation on any snippet of text each and every requirement could become a discussion. When a consensus is reached with the stakeholders the document owner could make the changes. No more random emails or marked up Word documents floating around. The whole document history and discussion are in one place. Nice.

Now, if only I could get a Google Wave invitation...