Even for that class where we used a wiki, they needed to have set assignments in place to force a good number of people in the class to actually use it. But it also took a little longer for some people to understand how to use it. Maybe as the general population becomes more comfortable with these types of things it’ll be easier to introduce something new.

There are usually two major types of people who will contribute to Wikis, in my opinion:

-People who contribute massive amounts of data, and edit others’ data in large amounts as well. These users are extremely rare, and in a population of 10 people you would probably only have 1 person who wanted to put forth this much effort (in that case, most likely the person who pushed for the Wiki in the first place!).

-People who make occasional small contributions. There are a lot more of these people, but you need a large number of them to make a collaborative difference.

If a group (even a small one) has a distinct goal they can definitely turn a Wiki into the right tool for the job, but if it’s a Wiki for general knowledge accumulation (with no concrete, achievable end state), I think you need a large user base to succeed.

I see what you are saying. There seems to be too much going on with Wave, and maybe it may never become very popular. I hope that it does stay alive though because it is still exciting to me what it could mean for collaboration.

I kind of think the software is too complex of an idea to be easily digested. Wikis are webpages anyone can edit. Chat is short messages that are sent back and forth and kept in a simple real-time log. E-mail is like chat only in longer form and with better organization and recipient designation functionality.

All of these are pretty simple ideas, but how would you simply describe Google Wave? It’s a mish-mash of everything. I think that people were excited about it, but Google got overzealous and threw in too many features, which is why enthusiasm for it has died down so much. It’s not a clever and simple tool; it’s a bulky swiss army knife containing everything AND the kitchen sink.

I remember when Gmail first came out and everyone was dying to get an invite because it wasn’t open to everyone yet. That sort of happened here too, but then the hype died down and I don’t see many people using it or talking about it anymore. I’m not sure why this happened, maybe it is too new for adoption just yet.

I think I would use it more if I had a job and workplace where people would use it because that is where I think it could be very effective. I’ve seen some plugins that are adding voice capabilities to Wave that could also catapult this into a great conferencing tool.

That’s definitely no easy task, though…