Looking forward to using Wave as well. should make those tedious, collaborative academic papers less tedious.

Be warned: Google says they have "lots of stamps to lick", so it may take a while to actually get the account.

But, when it goes to free for all, I will give it a look.

it may take some time for invites to go through. (The one sent to me, from someone at Google, took a few hours from queue to authorization. I made a few other invites this AM; as far as I know they're not authorized yet.)

Have you tried Facebook Lite? It's Facebook for 'low bandwidth connections' but for me, its selling point is the lack of whizz-bang third-party add-ons, games etc.

-kat

John Scalzi has some informative early impressions of the service on his blog.

I imagine they'll speed up invitations once they got some of the glitches worked out (There do seem to be some scaling issues). The propagation delay is already causing some problems; Twitter's already warned of scammers promising Wave invitations they don't actually have, in exchange for followers (which helps make spammers look more like real people), or other things of more tangible value.

I think I just figured out what Wave is. It's intended as the MS Outlook/Exchange killer.

Both Outlook and Exchange baffled me when I was using or operating an ISP. Exchange is a horribly inefficient mailserver for general Internet mail, and Outlook is a pretty poor email client. I couldn't see why they were used anywhere. When I was briefly doing a contract stint in a large corporation, I saw how they were used in that company and suddenly got it: Outlook mail was used for scheduling everyone's meetings and appointments on the shared calendar, sharing the latest draft of documents people were writing, sending around the schedules for projects, etc. The combination is at core a collaboration tool. The regular email part was almost incidental, and that is why other mailservers or email clients have been relatively ineffective at replacing the Exchange/Outlook combination.

Wave is, I strongly suspect, intended to obsolete both Exchange and Outlook with something that's even more dynamic and suited to collaboration.

I'm kevinmarks@googlewave.com if you want to Wave to me.

Clifton #30 - defining products as an X killer is always an odd way to look at it from a geek PoV; that said when Lars says he wants to reinvent email, that is the kind of activity he is talking about - emailing documents back and forth. Wave is at core a way for a small group to edit a document together, seeing the changes in real time if they want to, or with changes highlit in yellow when you return. Recently edited documents come up to the top of your inbox.
The inline comments embedded in the documents can be confusing.

(email changed from the spam account for this message.)

This doesn't mean they're not intended to be worthy services in their own right; indeed if they weren't, they would be irrelevant. It's more Google's choices of exactly what to offer that I find interesting.

(For what it's worth, I'm also dying to try out Google's shiny new toy)

If you haven't gotten a Wave invite, please let me know. I've got a few to hand out.

(I'm hoping my Super Special Bambi Eyes will land me one from one of them, personally.)

If you send me a personal email with the address you'd like the invite sent to, I could be persuaded to give you one (provided other folks don't get to me first! Even as a Google engineer, I only got 8 invites, and three are already gone.)

The sea has depths in which no net is cast,
With trackless kelpine forests where great squid,
Like Sasquatch in his mountains safely hid,
Dance dreaming with the fishes swimming past.
And human interaction is the same.
Beneath an email surface lies the deep:
Unmodeled work and social patterns creep
And spread in ways existing tools don't frame.
If all that data made a single stream
(Instead of tossing users to and fro
Among their applications), it could flow
To ever-mounting heights: Hokusai's dream.
It sounds like fun. I must confess I crave
To grab a board and surf the Google wave.

I'm intrigued by Wave, and wouldn't turn down an invite, but I know other people are much more excited about than I am. I'm still working on putting the rest of my life in order...

"Beneath an email surface lies the deep:
Unmodeled work and social patterns creep"

one humbly submitted tweak
s/kelpine/seaweed/

it is less poetic but is in the dictionary, and alliterates with squid and sasquatch

I sent a copy to the wave team - I thought they deserved to see it, since they did the work of building Wave.

IOW: Brava!

It was a deliberate coinage, in other words, not a loss for words. There's a fine tradition of Making Up Words in poetry; I should sneak by without too many points on my poetic license.

Mark @51:
Thanks for sending it on. I'd have done so, but I reckoned it would get lost in the spam traps somewhere. I hope they enjoy the feedback, though I bet they're drowning in OOOH, SHINY comments from all over right now.

Was also really annoyed that it wouldn't let me have rillian, or giles or ralph.giles as my account id. Even when none of those are obviously taken. So I have a login I can't quite remember.

Now, I just have to be online at the same time as someone I know who also has an account and wants to chat that way and not in any of the other myriad ways we might talk...ah the embarrassment of wonders that surround us.

Much thanks to Henry Farrell. I didn't even write a sonnet to get the invite.

My ID is Firstname.Lastname from the header of this post.

* The second hit was someone who died when the Titanic sank, I don't think that he is the one with the Ralph.Giles Google account.

Many thanks to Mark. It looks interesting, both in general and for several specific things I want to do.

Collaborative poetry? Stories?

It sounds like a great way to run an Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game campaign (which I haven't played since the GEnie SFRT days).

Oh, man, the temptation to finally really run Red Amber*. I ran the first part of it as a con game once, but the GMing partnership broke up and I stopped going to Ambercons for other reasons.

It would be perfect for Wave.

-----
* The premise of Red Amber is that the books are propaganda; the royals aren't really that powerful. But they are tyrants, dreadful ones, and outside the Eternal City is a vast slum (Rio is as much a Shadow of Amber as Rome). Amid the teeming and impoverished people from all over Shadow, the rags and tags of armies and wanderers now stuck in the shadow of Kolvir, discontent is growing. And the Golden Circle, barely kept in line by Benedict with his army of drafted cannon fodder and Caine with his impressed navies, is encouraging the restive mood.

And soon it starts. People of Amber unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

You mean a game at a convention, right? Not a confidence game?

signed, Momentarily Confused

Well, it is Amber, so there is always a substantial element of the psychological, but yes, I ran it at Ambercon UK in 1996 or so.

Very interesting indeed.

(The guy who brought the vodka did not help, either.)

My notes are long gone; I'd have to do all the world-building and historical research again. This would be the Original Revolution, of which France and Russia's were mere shadows (and China's, and Adron's Disaster, and so on).

Not This Year, I'll tell you that.