Musings about librarianship: GoogleWave - First thoughts

Description

It has being a crazy week, I was stressing out having to give my first ever presentation at the Libraries of the future seminar (with the new presentation tool Prezi !).

Google decided to make things more complicated by sending me an Invite to Google Wave ! I promptly gave it out to librarians I knew on Twitter and settled down to play with it.

First off , it's supposed to work in Firefox and Google Chrome. But many people have reported that it's slow and unstable in Firefox, and that has being my experience as well, so I use Google Chrome for now. It's still slow and not totally stable but it's far worse in Firefox.

Google wave as a email/IM hybrid

Google wave is hard to describe, but it's basically a Email/IM/Wiki hybrid.

You "wave" to one or more googlewave accounts by adding your contacts to a new wave, similar to the way you add email addresses when emailing. If people you have on your google contacts have a wave account they automatically appear as one of the possible contacts. The image below shows me starting a new wav.

Chances are though , you will have no one to wave to at first, so you have to figure out what their wave addresses are, or find some public waves to interact in.

What are public waves?

Like email conversations, you can usually only read waves you were added to as a contact. It is however possible to make a wave "public", so anyone with a wave account can read it (see this on how to make a wave public ).

You can do a search with:public keyword search in the middle pane, to find public waves. I like to do a search with:public librarians

There are waves ...

Original URL

http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/2009/10/googlewave-first-thoughts.html

http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/2009/10/googlewave-first-thoughts.html