The official Google Wave blog outlines various examples of what can be done with the Wave. Fancy words like ‘creative collaboration’ keep cropping up, but the post does actually offer some useful real-life examples as well.

Here are a couple we found interesting:

New ways for journalists to gather information

Social media blog Mashable’s reporter Vadim Lavrusik got a group of media professionals together to act as a ‘collective source’. Gina Chen, one of the participants, argues that apart from offering an easily accessible platform for a group discussion, the tool itself actually made the process more valuable than if all the participants had been interviewed separately.

And yes, she admits, the idea of interviewing people as a group isn’t new. But social media makes it a lot easier to facilitate this. And also, from a purely practical point of view, after a wave conversation the reporter doesn’t need to go through the lengthy process of transcribing a taped meeting or a group interview.

Organising day-to-day conversations in a small company

Based in different countries 8500 kilometers away from each other, a small company consisting of two people started using Wave to keep on top of their fragmented communication.

The problem for Caroline Dahllöf and Carolyn Uy, founders of Lyn And Line, was that a good part of their working day takes place while the other one is sleeping. They set up an individual wave for each project (no matter how small) which needs discussing.

“Unlike the clutter of emails that get saved in some folder, blips of information can be added to a particular wave wherever we need them to keep the conversation flowing and organised,” they described the benefits of a wave.

For Caroline and Carolyn, the beauty of the tool is that it notifies when a change has been made. So instead of going through an extra email summarising what has happened, each one can quickly glance through their inboxes in the morning to see what the other one has done.

Feature article

What went wrong with Google Wave?

Designed to merge emails, instant messaging, social networking and document sharing, Google’s “ultimate real-time collaboration tool” hasn’t been the success it was hoped to be. Read more…