(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:25 am)
Way back at the end of 2009, I started a correspondence with Internet communications maven Colleen Wainwright, using the then-hot Google Wave. The Wave, as we called it, quickly became an indispensable communication tool, allowing us to write what must be 100,000+ words of interwoven journal entries deconstructing the fabric of our respective realities; I wrote about this briefly to try to get a handle on why it worked so well for us. With the demise of Google Wave’s official support, we’ve tried a few replacements: Walkaround on AppEngine (technically difficult to deploy and use), Co-Meeting (very promising, but was broken in a single-but-fundamental aspect), and finally Rizzoma, which we’ve using now for 28 weeks.
The Rizzoma development team recently interviewed Colleen on our use of their product as a two-person idea incubator, part journal and part sounding chamber for our ideas. That’s the best explanation yet I’ve seen to describe what we’re doing in the Wrizz (as we call it). We even made a special exhibition version of one of our Wrizz discussions using Rizzoma’s Read-Only feature for their blog feature. Check out the Rizzoma blog post for a glimpse of how Colleen and I are collaborating. I think what makes it work is that we’re both garrulous conversational writers.
3 Comments
I always a struggled a bit with the purpose of Wave. I didn’t get a good sense of its full potential until I went back and reviewed in your posts how well it worked for you and Collen with a two-person collaboration. Thanks for the pointer to something that offers the same potential for a helpful idea playground.
Great to hear! I loved the idea of Wave and the things I could do, but I didn’t like its slowness or the lack of structure. I had found Rizzoma, Pivory, and RunBy.me but hadn’t tried any of them. I’ll give Rizzoma a try.
Britt: Thanks for checking out those past posts. Hope you get a chance to try it out.
Amit: I’m not familiar with Pivory and RunBy.me…will have to take a look at those myself!