Online Real Time Collaboration via Google Wave – A Must Have Experience!

Online Real Time Collaboration via Google Wave – A Must Have Experience!

About a month ago I paid a visit to my marketing guru (and a very dear friend) and while we were discussing some great online entrepreneurial ideas, I told him how a couple of friends and I have been trying to arrange social media marketing and strategy workshops but we never get time to be at one place, brainstorm our ideas and plan the entire project. When I was done narrating my predicament, he told me that we don’t necessarily have to be present psychically at one place to brainstorm and collaborate. He told me to try Google Wave which is an amazing tool to collaborate in real time with team on a project and so far he had found it very useful.
So I gave Google Wave a try.
The first thing I liked when I logged in was the mail in my inbox with embedded Google Wave tutorial video (it was great help to understand what the tool is all about). Then as I started exploring Google Wave, I saw options to create a new Wave for a meeting or a brainstorm session or a new document or task tracking.
I created a new Wave by clicking on the brainstorm icon. A new sub window popped in the main window and then I added my 3 friends who I had to work with on our workshops project.
I decided that until all 3 invitees find their invitation to join Google Wave, I should write a welcome note for them and type down my ideas about the project so I started typing. The first line typed became the name/title of the wave and then after typing a rather funny welcome note to greet my friends I wrote a brief intro of our workshops project and what was to be done next.
While I was just typing my thoughts away, I saw that one of my friends had just logged in on Wave and began to write something too in the same wave. He had started sharing his thoughts and both of us began working on the plan. In the meanwhile third friend of ours logged in and all 3 of us were typing and throwing our ideas at each other at the same time from the comforts of our homes.
The best way to describe Google Wave experience is that it is a combo of email and online chatting yet in a more visually pleasant and rich media format.
You can drop images, videos, attachments in the wave, use rich text, add links to the discussion, edit documents and what not but the best part is that it gets saved as one big mail message so you don’t have to worry about losing all the million dollar brainstorming you have done with your team on any project.
My experience with Google Wave is still underway as I am happily working on my project with my friends by collaborating with all of them in real time from the comforts of our own homes.
If you haven’t tried this fun and such an effective communication and collaboration tool by Google yet then you must give it a shot at least once. I bet you won’t be able to keep yourself off of it and you will be planning all your events and projects on Google Wave from then on.