A Google Expert’s research on Wave Timer

<<< >>> Published on: February 9, 2010 <<< >>> Last Modified on: February 9, 2010 <<< >>>

Google expert Anna-Christina is working on product marketing for Google Wave. She runs a weekly team meeting using waves: She starts the wave ahead of time, people add their questions and agenda items, then during the meeting she projected the wave on the screen for people in the room, and others just followed along. She told that it went pretty smoothly, except for one thing.

 

She explained that she would love a collaborative timer, clock, or stopwatch that she could put at the top of a wave when the meeting starts. As they begin each topic, they could set the timer for a given amount of time, and they could easily see when they were taking too much time (or approaching that stage). Ideally, they could embed the gadget twice, and used one of them to keep track of the overall meeting length.

While her example use case is for work, she thought a stopwatch extension could work for school applications (like timed practice tests), or any sort of timed activity in a wave, like office hours or a timed creative brainstorm like: How many haikus can we create in 5 minutes? Ready…..go!

A more sophisticated stopwatch extension could also include a robot to update the wave when time was nearing to an end, so that the wave popped up in participant’s inboxes. Then, it could be used for things like warning people when a meeting is about to start, or when a big event is about to happen (New Years!).

Happy waving!