I am still absolutely loving Google Wave. I now have a a Wave with Victor Maijer were we were trying to figure out how he could speak Dutch using Rosy the robot and then he had to go to a meeting. Michael Sofaer made a robot so we could find folks since the lookup function is not all there yet.
In general I am loving it still and now when I use Facebook and Twitter – I just wish all my pals were in Wave now. I don’t completely like the UI – but the combination of collaborative editing and threaded instant messaging and a nice sorted inbox are nice – it just needs to somehow be rethought to give me what I want when I want it.
I looked more into group support and found this page:
http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/google-wave-architecture
It talks about groups – but comes up way short of the feature set I want. You can add a group (i.e. pure list of folks) to a wave. What I need is groups plus roles within group and I would a wave to be ownable by a group.
We also need ways to permit wave writing and reading (and perhaps a few other permissions) based on group membership.
I think that this an be made to work if (a) groups can be provisioned by robots, and (b) there is a finer grain permission scheme than “this person or this group is a member of this wave”.
It is funny – in the welcome waves they had to lock down permissions so we would not hack their “welcome waves” – they apologize that the software does not deal gracefully with attempting to edit waves that you cannot edit. Hmmm. Sounds like the Wavemeisters are quickly reaching the same requirements conclusion. So why not dive in and just add context, group, role, and permission across the board. Hee hee – once I get stuck on something I just keep saying it over and over.
I will also say over and over that Wave is sooo cool – with some rethink of the UI and some smart robots – Wave is the answer to a communications and document dashboard and lets us combine Facebook, Twitter, Email and IM together – Wave On!