strangely entangled

I’ve just beta-launched one of my secret projects: Dr. Tablet, a website dedicated to mobile tablet-based computing, including lots of coverage of the rumored Apple Tablet that’s due to be announced on January 27, 2010.

Right now the Dr. Tablet website focuses primarily on news & rumors surrounding the Apple tablet release, but we’ll be adding additional content in the future, including branching out to cover other tablet devices (such as the Viliv X70 sitting on my desk here).

I hope you’ll take a look at Dr. Tablet – you can also follow our posts on the Dr. Tablet twitter feed.

I freely admit it: I just don’t get the Vancouver tech community’s infatuation with the downtown east side, aka “the poorest postal code in Canada”.

It seems every Web 2.0 startup and social media company in Vancouver locates itself in Gastown / DTES. No doubt they’re doing so to take advantage of the (relatively) cheap rent, and to network with the other tech companies in the area.

I asked about this on Twitter, and the only response I got was from Karen Fung, who pointed out that the DTES offers “walkable mixed-used” and “brick & mortar that makes them feel like real companies”. I can understand this somewhat – Vancouver’s downtown is tiny compared to other Canadian cities’ (even Ottawa’s core seemed bigger to me), and true brick & mortar buildings are in short supply here on the west coast. So if you want that environment at a reasonable price, it’s the DTES or nothing. In Toronto or Montreal, you can get brick & mortar anywhere you want. Here in Van, not so much.

We recently signed up for a 1-day seminar that was held in Gastown. $300 for the day, and the venue was a boarded up building with an abandoned first floor, situated between an emergency shelter and a hostel. Not a good way to make a good first impression on your clients.

I run a small web and software development company, and lately we’ve been testing out Google Wave as a collaboration platform. After what I discovered today, we’re dropping Wave immediately.

Before I get into specifics, let me say that I realize that Google Wave is still a “Developer’s Preview”, and that I shouldn’t expect much from it. I understand that completely. But Google is promoting Wave in part as a collaborative tool for remote workers, and that’s exactly the situation my company was using it for.

We’ve been using Wave to develop and design the concept for a new project we’re working on. I recently invited two associates into the wave to get their feedback on some of our work (as they are representative of our target audience). The very first paragraph in our wave indicates that content of the wave is confidential and we expected them to treat it as such.

The problem occurred when one of my associates became pretty excited about the project, and invited one of his friends to the Wave. Suddenly, our project plans were accessible to an external, 3rd party whom I’ve never met! Ack! No problem, I’ll just remove that user. Oh wait, there’s no remove button anywhere.

That’s right. You cannot remove a person from a Wave, even if you are the original “Wave Founder”.

Wonderful. So my next thought was: “I’ll just back this all up and delete the Wave altogether”. Wrong. You cannot delete a Wave, even if you are the original “Wave Founder”.

Double-Ack! OK, well then I’ll just delete the content of the Wave. No, that won’t work either because Google Wave keeps a history of all changes, which anyone with access can play back at any time. It doesn’t matter if you delete the content today, because they can view the Wave content as it was yesterday.

Finally, any Wave member can invite new members to your Wave. So the new person could, if they want, invite their friends … or even worse, invite the public Wave account which would mean that your formerly private, employees-only Wave is now accessible to the Internet at large, with zero ways of reining it in.

So what did I do?

1. I requested that the new Wave member unfollow our Wave from his inbox.
2. I pointed out to the person that invited him that the contents of the Wave were to be considered confidential, as was posted in the very first paragraph in that Wave.
3. I also deleted all of the content I contributed to the Wave, although any Wave member could easily dig up the history via the Playback tool.
4. Finally, I informed all members of the Wave that all further discussion would occur on our private Wiki, where I have complete access control.

My big mistake here was using an untested tool like Google Wave for potentially sensitive business communications. That’s very unlike me, as I normally don’t trust “the cloud” with my information as much as others do. I got suckered in by promises of easy communication and collaboration, but I should’ve known better. While Google Wave shows promise, after this experience it will be a very long time before I trust it with any of my information – sensitive or not. Even as a “Developer Preview”, I’m surprised that Google released it to the public without basic management features.