Google Spreadsheets
I mentioned here earlier I was testing Web 2.0 technologies and group collaboration this weekend. Garrett commented that he wanted to know more about it, so I’ll talk about Google’s collaborative spreadsheets here. The other tools we used aren’t really anything I haven’t discussed before: instant messaging and wikis.
Google spreadsheets is quite powerful because it allows many people work on the same spreadsheet at once. We ran into problems because people needed to have a Gmail account and Google login in order to access the spreadsheets. Not everyone in the group wanted to establish an identity there, especially if they were only going to be looking at one spreadsheet briefly and possibly not editing it at all.
Also, people don’t always want to wait around for an e-mail to arrive when they’re trying to do something in a hurry. Although it’s possible to look at older revisions, it’s not easy to just look at the spreadsheet to see who made certain contributions. I would like something that more obvious, like the way MediaWiki handles histories, and the ability to compare different versions.
