Google Wave is a place that allows you to share documents with other people, work on them all together, and do so with real-time instant e-mail and instant messaging. High-level research students have found a good tool in Wave finding collaborators and critics for their work around the world. Topic initiators set up a Wave to take something up, a-la Google Docs. Collaborators and other interested parties from around the world can join the discussion and post their observations and notes, in real-time. For note-taking, Wave provides options for groups within the Wave discussion: extra-curricular groups, rotating in-class groups and so on.

One application is used to take the place of several discrete ones. Applications like Google Docs can easily bring a number of people together to collaborate in real time developing and debating an idea using real-time chat and e-mail; frequently a collaborator might need to trace a line of discussion to its beginning: with a Rewind function.

Unlike how it would be in a real group, a virtual group like this allows anyone who wishes to slack off to do so without ever having anyone else know about it. There is no inherent check and balance system you’d find in a virtual group that can expose the absence of a contribution from slackers. Google Wave can be a wonderful tool: for those who are self-motivated. As with other examples of modern technology, a person who needs a group to march in step with will have a measure of trouble keeping accountable.

When scientists working on similar subjects happen to run into each other they usually consider themselves uncommonly lucky to have found partners and collaborators in their venture. The scientific community though is giving up on hopelessly waiting on serendipity, and is trying to make luck happen for it; the conception that will help them do this is a new Facebook-like service called Vivoweb; and it is supposed to bring scientists together to help them discover one another and collaborate in a more reliable fashion than traditionally has been known.

The Vivo project originated at University of Florida six years ago at Cornell’s Mann library. In the beginning Vivo was a network of scientists at Cornell University alone; over time though, Vivo has expanded across several universities, indexing scientists, projects and collaborations all over to help the scientists across the country find one another through a Facebook-like interface. As more and more American universities and institutions have come to accept the standard set by Vivo, the network has begun spreading outside of the country too. Universities in Australia and China, indeed in disciplines outside of the medical profession too are beginning to explore networking with Vivo. Conservative people have always complained about the pointlessness of social networking; happily, news of this kind is certain to gladden the heart of many a censorious fogey.

Google Docs also offers Autosave and version control features. Google Docs items can have various levels of access, Private, Shared with specified users or Published to the Web. Published items again can have various access levels: they can be viewed only by the user, or by a specified group or by the whole world.

While Google Docs offers users the features of a modern office suite for free there are issues of privacy that worry experts. Though Google has promised to protect the privacy and security of users’ content, certain problems exist. For example, each image included in a document has a public address, even if the document itself is private and the image continues to be publicly available even after the document is deleted.

Recently, Google announced a change in its policy regarding published documents which will allow published docs that are linked to from a public Web site to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results. This is potentially a very exciting change as the published docs will reach a much wider audience of people. Unfortunately, many users who may have linked published documents intended for a limited audience to public Web sites for various reasons of convenience will be now taken unawares by this change in policy.

It is not immediately obvious from the Google Docs master listing which documents are likely to be affected, as there is no easy way to tell if a published document has been linked to by a Web site. For now, users will just have to go through all their documents and “unpublish” all documents that are intended to be private.