When I wrote this one up in 2007 with my co-author, this was all done via email:- http://precedings.nature.com/documen... Nowadays, however, all the one's I'm co-authoring now are being done using google docs and the like. IMO this not only applies to data, but also to knowledge/information/ideas and so on. - Graham Steel

Theoretically, this is something Wave could excel in. - Mr. Gunn

There is an element of the need for push notification bizarrely enough. Its the most effective and general way of bringing people back into a service to interact with a document. Its not an accident that GoogleDocs provides email notification mechanisms of changes. This was indeed one of the things that appealed to me about Wave, that it has the potential to mix the Wiki collaborative authoring side with a "single inbox" but obviously that requires that people adopt it as an inbox - in turn requiring a good email to Wave gateway ironically. - Cameron Neylon

Exactly. Expecting Wave to be the initial point of entry for wave-related stuff isn't realistic. That said, remember the current client is just a demo client - the true power of Wave is the underlying protocol, which could be woven into all kinds of things on the web invisibly. - Mr. Gunn

I've always wanted a feature to convert an email into a discussion forum. Unfortunately wave doesn't do that. Basecamp and Campfire actually do a better job of that kind of interaction (as an example) - Deepak Singh

I think there are several factors, among them are: 1. Getting used to new mediums 2. People do not understand what tool is good for what 3. People get confused about the features and objectives each tools provides 4. People do not wanna share with everybody/privacy issues - mariana

Facebook page of drunk son of co-worker? - Egon Willighagen

Email remains the ONLY ubiquitous social medium. Non-FF-ers will not read this. Wave, FB, Mendeley, Connotea, Cite-U-Like, even twitter, are social islands. Only half my team uses twiiter; if I need to talk to them all, I have to use email. - Chris Rusbridge

Incorporating email alerts to changes in documents makes wikis (at least the one I use) and Google Spreadsheets work well in my experience. Curiously GoogleDocs don't have that option - but the technology is so good that it works well for private proposals, papers and other text based projects. - Jean-Claude Bradley

(I'll try not to make my point without turning it into a sales pitch) We have a PI in a sabbatical in the states, her lab is in Israel, she uses our platform to follow and review every progress made in her lab. the system allows her to know when new results are posted and she can comment and make sure her researchers are on the right track. this is just one example. The key in my opinion is keeping everything in context , the major problem with email and even Wave for that matter is that they are all pretty disconnected from all other aspects of your research and in the long run going back to such a resource might be impossible. - Jonathan Gross

That's right, Johnathan, and a lab can manage its own projects with a project management tool such as BioKM, but what about distributed collaboration between labs or teams? This is where top-down hierarchical systems break down, because the investment of getting into the project itself is a barrier. For example, how would a team using your system share results with another team using a wiki or different system? - Mr. Gunn

Within my field (philosophy), blogs are used primarily as a gossip medium and a way of getting calls for papers, conference announcements and funding information and the like out, and only a little bit as a kind of pre-peer-review pre-press where people can frankly exchange ideas. There's a few people using Wave, but we're sorting of flailing around in the dark with it trying to find a problem for the solution. - Tom Morris

It's interesting actually - I've just come recently across a whole bunch of "not the usual suspects" using Wave who have had almost no introduction and just found it useful for distributed lab communication and similar things. Two interesting facts - they are just using the vanilla client with essentially no Robots or Gadgets - its the underlying real time nature that is important - and secondly they have not previously used e.g. GoogleDocs despite being aware of them. I'm not sure of the reasons for this but I'll be interested to dig in and find out. - Cameron Neylon

Or perhaps they started with a problem that Wave addressed, whereas we're starting with the solution and looking for the problem. - Walter Jessen

I think its an element of both - I think Google Docs didn't really work for them because it was too document like - dropbox was a much better solution in one case, which fits with the "must go into the work flow" theory. Wave they are using in a journal like way, although in one case in a very sophisticated journal-like manner. Limited data points but it is interesting. As you say, it seemed to solve the problem they had. I think this is still true of us but that we expect too much to be solved at once.... - Cameron Neylon