I have recently been “chosen” to receive a fistful of invitations to Google‘s newest permanent beta product Google Wave.

This new application is bundled along with an 81 minute video that explains what it is and what it does. My first impression upon noticing that little fact suggested that anything that requires almost an hour and a half to explain is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it likely to interest the casual user. I have spent some time futzing around with Google Wave and believe that I am, indeed, ready to share my initial impressions.

First, I will save you 81 minutes of your life and give you my less than 200 word description of Google Wave. Google Wave is an on-line collaboration application that allows you to collect all information from all sources associated with the topic under discussion in one place. That includes search results, text files, media files, drawings, voicemail, maps, email, reports…everything you can implement, store or view on a computer. Additionally, Google Wave allows you to include and exclude people from the collaboration as the discussion progresses and evolves. And in the usual Google manner, a developer’s API is provided so that interested companies or individuals can contribute functionality or customize installations to suit their needs.

Additionally, (and perhaps cynically) Google Wave serves as a platform for Google to vacuum up and analyze more information about you and your peers and collaborators to be able to serve you more accurately targeted advertisements – which, after all, is what Google’s primary business is all about.

All right…so what about it? Was using Google Wave a transformative experience? Has it turned collaboration on its head? Will this be the platform to transform the global workforce into a seamless, well-oiled machine functioning at high efficiency regardless of geographical location?

My sense is that Google Wave is good but not great. The crushing weight of its complexity means that the casual user (i.e., most people) will never be able to (or, more precisely, never want to) experience the full capabilities of Google Wave. Like Microsoft Word, you will end up with 80% of the users using 20% of the functionality with this huge reservoir of provided functionality never being touched. In fact, in a completely non-scientific series of discussions with end-users, most perceive Google Wave to be no more than yet another email tool (albeit a complex one) and therefore really completely without benefit to them.

My personal experience is that it is a cool collaboration environment and I appreciate its flexibility although I have not yet attempted to develop any custom applications for it. I do like the idea of collecting all discussion-associated data in one place and being able to include appropriate people in the thread and having everything they need to come up-to-speed within easy reach. Personally, I still need to talk to people and see them face-to-face but I appreciate the repository/notebook/library/archive functionality afforded by Google Wave.

I still have a few invitations left so if you want to experience the wave yourself and be your own judge, post a comment with your email address and I’ll shoot an invite out to you.

In these days of tight budgets but no shortage of things to do, more and more companies are finding that having a flexible workforce is key. This means that having the ability to apply immediate resources to any project is paramount. But also as important, is the ability to de-staff a project quickly and without the messiness of layoffs.

While this harsh work environment seems challenging, it actually can very rewarding both professionally and monetarily and see both the employers and employees coming out winners.

The employees have the benefit of being able to work on a wide variety of disparate projects. This can yield a level of excitement unlikely to be experienced in a full time position that is usually focussed on developing deep expertise in a narrow area. The employers get the ability to quickly staff up to meet schedules and requirements and the ability to scale back just as quickly.

Of course, this flexibility – by definition – means that there is no stability and limited predictability for both employees and employers. The employees don’t know when or where they will see the next job and the employers don’t know if they will get the staff they need when they need it. While some thrive in this sort of environment, others seek the security of knowing with some degree of certainty what tomorrow brings. With enough experience with a single contractor, an employer can choose to attempt to flip the contractor from a “renter” to an “owner”. Similarly, the contractor may find the work atmosphere so enticing that settling down and getting some “equity” might be ideal.

It is a strange but mutually beneficial arrangement with each party having equal stance and in effect both having the right of first refusal in the relationship. And it may very well be the new normal in the workplace.

It’s the Rodney Dangerfield of disciplines. Sweaty, unkempt, unnerving, uncomfortable and disrespected. Test. Yuck. You hate it. Design, baby! That’s where it’s at! Creating! Developing! Building! Who needs test? It’s designed to work!

In actuality, as much as it pains me to admit “trust, but verify” is a good rule of thumb. Of course, every design is developed with an eye to excellence. Of course, all developers are very talented and unlikely to make mistakes of any sort. But it’s still a good idea to have a look-see at what they have done. It’s even better if they leave in the code or hardware that they used to verify their own implementations. The fact of the matter is that designers add in all manner of extras to help them debug and verify their designs and then – just before releasing it – they rip out all of this valuable apparatus. Big mistake. Leave it! It’s all good! If it’s code – enable it with a compile-time define or environment variable. If it’s hardware – connect it up to your boundary-scan infrastructure and enable it using instructions through your IEEE STD 1149.1 Test Access Port. These little gizmos that give you observability and diagnosability at run time will also provide an invaluable aid in the verification and test process. Please…share the love!

For no apparent reason, but moreso than ever before, I have come to believe that the World Wide Web can truly be the source of all knowledge and a savior for the lazy (or at least an inspiration to those who need examples to learn or get started).

I was writing a simple application in C the other day and needed to code up a dynamic array. It seemed to me that actually typing out the 20 or so lines of code to implement the allocation and management was just too much effort. And then it occurred to me – “Why reinvent the wheel?” People write dynamic arrays in C every day and I bet that at least one person posted their implementation to the WWW for all to see and admire. A quick search revealed that to be true and in minutes I was customizing code to suit my needs.

Now…did I really save time? In the end, did my customizations result in no net increase in productivity? In many ways, for me, it didn’t matter. I am the sort of person who needs some inspiration to overcome a blank sheet of paper – something concrete – a real starting point – even a bad one. Having that implementation in place gave me that starting point and even if I ended up deleting everything and rewriting it I feel like I benefited, at least psychologically, from having somewhere to start.

It is also valuable to see and learn from the experience of others. Why should I re-invent something so basic? Why not use what’s already extant and spend my energy and talent where I can really add value?

But it is also true that although the WWW may indeed be “the wheel” it sometimes provides a wheel made from wood or stone, that has a flat tire or is damaged beyond repair. For me, though, even that is beneficial since it helps me overcome that forbidding blank sheet of paper.

I have decided to use this blog to out-gas on things I am thinking about. Aren’t you happy about that?

I have spent some time looking around the popular virtual world platform Second Life. In a virtual world, you assign yourself an avatar (basically a cartoon character representing you) and walk around this large simulated space and interact with other avatars and objects. There is a fun and coolness factor to it all. There are museums to explore, historical location recreations, science fiction universes and dance floors. Lots of dance floors. But what really intrigues me is the very presence in Second Life of large Fortune 500 companies like IBM and Cisco. What are they up to there?

I spoke to some people experiencing and supporting those companies’ Second Life presence in impromptu discussions “in world” (as they say). The conversations often left me with more questions than answers.  While the Second Life experience promises a high degree of interaction, it comes at a significant cost.  A user needs to become conversant in the use of the proprietary viewer (a special-purpose browser to connect you with the virtual world), the methods for creation, manipulation and animation of  objects and the utilization of the on-line chat facility or its voice-based interaction mechanism.  The primary question is: given all of these costs and barriers to adoption, what is the benefit of this experience over say, WebEx (which Cisco actually owns) or Telepresence (which Cisco also heavily promotes) or even a standard teleconference?  The common answer was either that Second Life was “cool” or “fun” – just what I experienced.  But is that enough?  Does that constitute “the killer app” for virtual worlds? It’s “cool” and “fun”?

There are also, however, some intangibles. People hiding behind their personal (and anonymous) avatars tend to be a little bolder. They tend to speak more openly and honestly. That can allow for more compelling and fruitful interactions and in collaborative circumstances result in better outcomes and solutions developed. Some studies have even shown that this boldness is transferrable to real life. So maybe, these companies are engaging in a little social cognitive therapy for those legions of techies they employ expecting to elicit better human interaction as a result. And that makes it all worthwhile.