My Extension Wish: Wave Timer

Hi, I'm Anna-Christina, I work on product marketing for Google Wave. Aside from "drinkin' coffee", I run a weekly team meeting using waves: I start the wave ahead of time, people add their questions and agenda items, then during the meeting I project the wave on the screen for people in the room, and others just follow along. Generally, it runs pretty smoothly, except for one thing: I can't tell how long we talk about each topic!

I would love a collaborative timer, clock, or stopwatch that I could put at the top of a wave when the meeting starts. As we begin each topic, we can set the timer for a given amount of time, and we could easily see when we are taking too much time (or approaching that stage). Ideally, we could embed the gadget twice, and use one of them to keep track of the overall meeting length. I run a tight ship! :)

While my example use case is for work, I think a stopwatch extension could work for school applications (like timed practice tests), or any sort of timed activity in a wave, like office hours or a timed creative brainstorm like: How many haikus can we create in 5 minutes? Ready.....go!

A more sophisticated stopwatch extension could also include a robot to update the wave when time was nearing to an end, so that the wave popped up in participant's inboxes. Then, it could be used for things like warning people when a meeting is about to start, or when a big event is about to happen (New Years!).

Feel free to discuss ideas for the stopwatch extension in the forum or in a public wave, and make sure to submit it to the extensions gallery when you're ready to share it with the world (and most importantly, *me*).

Happy waving!

Posted by Anna-Christina Douglas, Product Marketing, Google Wave