Google Wave Wants You!

It's a little bit county! It's a little bit rock 'n roll! It's one over-sized network mash-up! Google Wave is part Outlook, IM, calendar, Twitter, wiki, spreadsheets/docs/presentation, picture sharing, social media, forums, maps and just about everything else on the web, but the kitchen sink! It's what some have called "email on steroids."

Open for beta testing on September 30, 2009, one hundred thousand have not only been invited to sign-up, but each of those invitees can nominate five additional people to "join the wave."  The official Google Wave blog indicated the following:

Starting Wednesday, September 30 we'll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select customers of Google Apps

The tool is open source which means third party developers can build APIs to interact with it, similarly to Twitter and Facebook.

Product managers, Stephanie and Greg provide us with a "Readers' Digest" version of their original 80-minute ("War & Peace") video which they introduced back in May.



For those that are leery of other Wavers seeing everything we are doing, the developers are working on a draft mode which will allow the real-time aspect to be switched off.

Unlike traditional instant messenger (IM) conversation threads that we start will continue and we can pick back up on the strand when we engage later at a future date.

As a collaboration tool, sharing photos on Wave only requires a drag and click from anywhere on your desktop to your Wave platform.

According to a BBC report, Google Wave will have a full consumer launch early next year. So even if Google doesn't want you just yet...your days are numbered! I would suspect in less than a year, we will all be catching the Wave!