Creating a Collaborative Wave Story

A few months ago, I got an invite from my friend, Ben, to Google Wave. I heard the hype and wanted to check it out. So, I got my Wave site set up and … consider me so far pretty unimpressed. Wave is sort of like a merging of email, chat and a wiki. Or something. A disclaimer: Google still considers Wave in beta, so more is sure to come and maybe that will make it more useful to me.

Still, I am determined to try out some of the possibilities and see Wave in action, if I can. Remember: we can’t really think about the learning possibilities of new technology without trying it ourselves.

So, I decided that maybe Wave would be a good way to start a collaborative short story (a sort of exquisite corpse idea). The Wave platform seems like a natural way for a person to start a wave with the start of a story and then allow others to add to the story. It could happen in real time or over time. It would not matter, since Wave is built for both experiences.

So I started a story in a Wave, and went through the process of adding folks from my contact list (I think Wave migrates contacts from gmail) to the short story Wave, sent out a few Tweets to let folks know about it, and … just one person (Thank you Sheryl!) has added a few lines to the story. I think I did everything I needed to do: I added contacts into the Wave, I opened it up for the public, etc.

Here is the story that I began:

To say she was connected would be too simple a statement. She was never disconnected. Even in her sleep, her dreams came to her in bursts of 140 characters. (She knew this because she often woke up and jotted down her dreams, a habit she acquired in her college psychology course. Her notebook was full of nighttime ramblings.)

And so, the night of the storm, with the weather forecasters freaking out about the high winds and possible lightning, she, too, began to freak out. She checked for batteries. She stood waiting near the electrical outlets, ready to pull the plugs at the first flash of lightning.

The last thing she expected was the knock at the door, but then, the unexpected always comes at the unexpected moment …

I figure the next step is to open up the Wave story to my blogging friends who might want to explore along with me.

SO — if you want to join my collaborative story Wave, you can do that by going here — http://tinyurl.com/yjlln5g — and if you don’t have Wave but want to see what the fuss is about, just leave me a comment here and I will send you off an invite (I think I have about 25 invites to dole out) into Wave.

I’d love to see the possibilities of this thing, but I can’t do it alone (the beauty of Wave is that it is built on the concept of collaboration, unless you are alone on your wave, and then it gets pretty lonely in the surf).

Don’t know what the heck I am talking about? Here is an overview of what Google Wave is:

Peace (in the collaboration),
Kevin

One Comment
  1. Pingback: Life is not a race to be first finished » Blog Archive » Collaborative Google Wave Story

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