I’ve been using Wave for the past week, on an experimental basis and to work on a couple of projects with clients. I’ve noticed that a lot of posts and articles have been focusing on the similarities to chat, email and micro-blogging without really looking at the full range of features, or their application to specific tasks and contexts. So here I’ve drawn together some videos that show a range of uses.
Overview | Neater Messaging
This is a great hand-animated view showing some of Waves features. It focusses on the centralization of the conversation, which makes wave cleaner to use than a stack of emails.
Internal Workflow | SAP Gravity
This demonstrates the use of gadgets in a business context. Notice in particular how the centrally hosted gadget:
preserves a state history so that the different stages in construction of the model can be replayed along with the main conversation
communicates with the back-end system as part of an extended workflow
Customer Relations | Sales Force
Here a “robot” is used to intelligently deal with the early stages of a customer support query, including eventually passing the customer on to a human support agent. Again, the wave is smoothly integrated with a backend system.
Education | Wave Alpha
Here the Wave Alpha robot uses responds to questions ranging from basic arithmetic, through calculus and meteorology to the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.
Aviary have done it again, this time with an online audio editor that comes with a collection of loops and effects for you to incorporate in your own works.
You can even record directly into the web application.
Veritocracy is a social news network with a difference – you don’t socialise. Instead users of the site vote article up or down anonymously, and have their preferences inferred from their voting patterns.
Just because an article contained information you are glad you read, does not necessarily mean you endorse it. Veritocracy uses your votes to feed you more of what you want to see, and less of what you don’t. With most social news or bookmarking sites, a vote translates into a public endorsement of an article. In some cases this can also mean a public endorsement of the author and/or the viewpoints contained in it. Veritocracy makes all votes private to ensure that everyone can vote frequently and honestly, without having to consider how those votes will be perceived by others.
The service is still in beta, so it will still be a while before we find out whether anonymity breeds wiser crowds. In the meantime I can’t help but admire the beautiful interface.
Social media company Sprout have launched a new brand marketing product. Sprout Mixer lets content owners provide fans with simple tools to design and share gadgets in blogs and social networks.
Sprout is very excited to launch www.sproutmixer.com and show the world the product we have been working on concurrently (for the past 11 months) with Sprout Builder. Sprout Mixer is built on the same platform as Sprout Builder but it has a simpler user interface and the ability to be white-labeled or skinned. We are creating a new form of online interaction that we are calling, “Creative Engagement Marketing.” With our tools you can create a brand experience for your fans and consumers.
The gadgets can be copied from user to user, and can also be remixed and adapted my more creative fans.
With obvious applications in film and music brading, it will be interesting to see what other industries try out this marketing approach, and what other experiences will be shared. I’d love to see something like Mixer used in education, with students selecting and mashing up learning resources.
Some new Google Talk features make it much easier for site owners to keep in touch with their visitors.
You can now embed a “chatback” badge in your site that lets visitors see whether you’re available for a chat session. A simple wizard lets you choose between different badge formats, including a version that can be sent by email. When clicked, the badge launches a simplified web based Google Talk client.
The full version of the client now features group chat and media embedding.
Below you'll find links to the latest comments, notes and tweets that I've made while wandering around the web. These are consolidated using FriendFeed.
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
