If you go back and look at how Google started as a company, it's really amazing to see how much they have grown. Starting out with search, they have grown into many areas including collaboration, mobile, and productivity. While at times I wish that Google would focus, it's hard to argue against their strategy as they are leaders in the search market and challengers in many other areas.

So when they announced Google Wave there was a ton of hype because everyone was waiting for that next killer application from Google. Let's face it, these are the guys who did Google Search, Gmail, Adwords. All game changers in their categories, so expectations were pretty high.

But something happened along the way.. No one really knew what to do with it.

I am like a lot of people when I say that I honestly haven't used Wave a whole lot. When Google first announced it I rushed out and got an invitation, started a few Wave's with some buddies, but the interest quickly faded. That doesn't mean that Wave couldn't be a great tool for workshifting and after I revisited it some benefits bubbled up to the surface:

•    For team collaboration it quickly beats trading information back and forth via email. We have all been on those long email strings, soon you lose track of what came first, that important attachment that everyone else is referencing has been misplaced in your inbox. With Wave all of this information is contained within the Wave for everyone to see. One version of the truth.

•    Get new teammates up to speed quickly. As you add new people to your team you can quickly get them up to speed by using the playback feature found in every wave. The playback starts over at the beginning of the wave and you can quickly see the content and people who where added to wave as they happened.

•    Wave brings conversation into your project. How many times have you been working remotely on a project, needed some additional information from a team member, and you then had to use other tools to start these offline conversations. With Wave, all of these conversations can happen within the project where they are then stored for the whole team to see.

I decided to take another run at really using Wave to see if it fits into my workshifting toolbox and I need your help. A few weeks back I posted five reasons why your boss won't let you workshift and now I want to come up with a post that focuses on the reasons why you can.

I have started a wave so that we can collaborate on the responses. This will help me out by getting some feedback on my post and it will allow us to kick the tires on Google Wave to see the good and the bad. I will put out a follow up post on how Wave worked and if it meets the mark for workshifting use.

If you are interested in joining, make sure you have a Google Wave account, and shoot me an email at wave@itkgroup.com and I will email you the invite. Hopefully we will get a new post put together and we will see if Google Wave is a workshifting treasure or tease.

Have you found any workshifting benefits of Google Wave?


Photo Credit: Rafa Garces