Sunday, April 08, 2012
Co-Meeting Is Google Wave-Inspired Group Collaboration Tool
lifehacker.com: Remember Google Wave? We still do, and depending on who you ask, it was either a collaboration tool that was ahead of its time, or a complicated tool with no single defined purpose. Either way, if you miss the unique, real-time collaboration features that Google Wave offered, Co-Meeting is a new web service that brings a lot of them back, including real-time, as-you're-typing conversations, document storage, in-line to-dos, notes, and meeting minutes, and more.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Based on this article, Google Wave seems a lot like a glorified Skype. Maybe a little more sophisticated, but probably not enough to spend money on.
The advantage Google has for anything they put out is that they already control a lot of our lives. The article mentioned adding something to a "to-do" list. I'm betting there's a way (or shortly will be) to click a button and add a talked about event or to-do straight to your google calendar. And shared documents can be organized easily in Google Docs, instead of floating around your computer. If Google integrates features like this, it would make this much more useful than things like Skype could ever be.
From what I understand, they upgraded google wave which, from experience, was a glorified multiple person text editor co-meet then added a “reddit style” commenting section onto it so that people could chat as they are working on the document. I think that combination could be really powerful but it could also suffer from the pitfalls of reddit commenting and multi-person text editing. The comments are great as long as people don't come back and try to rehash decisions that have been made because they weren't there when the original discussion started. Likewise, multi-person text editing is great but you need to make sure every part comes together as a whole. Also, because everyone is working on everything, no one takes ownership of any one part and this makes it a lot harder to fact check and ensure accuracy in the final product.
I would think that multi-person editing is a key part of this tool. Think about how fluidly students and co-workers use google docs to co-write and co-edit documents. Often all persons are together in the google doc meeting, each having the document open on his or her own computer. Why not add "skype" to this? Some I am sure already skype and doc for their meetings, so why not make it one program? And they add dropbox-like functions as well. All the most common tools in one.
As the author mentions, it is free, do we might as welol try it.
This seems like a good idea but not that much different than other products out on the market. I think that one of the best features is that multiple people at a time can edit a document during the discussion. Also I understand that sometimes people are in different geographic locations but I feel a lot can be said for an in person discussion with someone. I agree that adding a video chat feature would improve the program.
Post a Comment