I can't help, but I note that sometime Making Light contributor Andy Ihnatko reviewed Google Wave back in July.

Has it really been 5 years already since I started using Gmail? My goodness. Alas, I'm no longer special enough to get in on Wave as I was with Gmail. I guess they're bitter I switched to Wordpress.

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

I have a leftover invite. Please check e-mail at tnh@... for details.

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

What is wave? and, good lord, yes five years.

Wave is part instant messenger, part Google Docs, part facebook page. Allows conversation and group multimedia document editing updated in real time. The link up top goes to a very long video of the demo at Google IO earlier this year, which makes it look pretty cool.

Me next, please! (Soon as someone can invite...)

Terry @ 4: Wave is a combination of e-mail, IM, wikis and collaborative document editing. There's a 10 minute demo video showing off various Wave features. Google wants Wave to be an open protocol, and they've released a primitive open source server that will eventually be able to talk to their own server.

Woah... I am not sure I am up for that. Too old-fashioned in too many ways (twitter baffles me; I need context. Facebook is marginal, for much the same reason).

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

I'd certainly like an invite. Please. Please. Please.

I just invited pnh (at your panix email; I don't know your gmail address offhand. I see tnh was already invited, by Eric.)

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.)

Like Fragano and Jacques, I'd also love an invite, if anyone's got an extra one to spare.

Huge thanks to Eric K and to John Mark Ockerbloom. Neither of us has actually received anything from our pastel overlords yet, but we'll be patient...

I have tentacles out in the cybersphere...(e.g., nothing to report, but I thought I'd waste a few electrons anyway.)

Terry Karney #8:

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.

Soon Lee @ 14: woo! Thanks, I hadn't heard of Facebook Lite but it just might get me to start using Facebook again. (I stopped when they merged quiz results into the general stream of updates.)

Liza @ 15: You do know that you can hide quiz results, right? Also, you can alter how updates display and what you see in the stream.

Summer @ 16 - true, but each quiz has to be hidden individually (with a few exceptions).

Summer @ 16: If you can hide quiz results en masse and not just one by one, I'd love to hear how!

pnh @ 12: I've heard 24-48 hours for recent invites.

I hide Facebook quizzes individually (remember that once you do hide one, you won't see that one again), but if you want to view your News Feed so that it ONLY shows status updates, you can click on "Status Updates" under "News Feed" at the left of your page, and it will show you just Status Updates from your friends, with no quizzes, apps, Notes, or anything else.

Two invites sent...

I wouldn't mind an invite either, but I don't need one....

I'm a bit surprised you didn't get one from Scalzi.

I know I'm only mostly a lurker around these here parts, but if anyone's got a spare, I'd love to have one.

-kat

That's a great idea - if there are any more invites, I would kill for one.

I'll join the bandwagon if anyone has a free invite handy.

I'd love an invite as well. This would be perfect for a couple of projects I've got going and/or coming up soon.

They seem to be slow about sending out invites; none of my nominations from yesterday seem to have gone through yet.

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.

If there are extra Wave invites about, I would love to have one. Just, you know, asking.

Rampant speculation follows:

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.

Obligatory plug - when you get Wave accounts, have a look at the Ribbit Conference gadget that lets you quickly set up a conference call with people on a Wave so you can talk while you edit.

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.

Distraction would be good currently, so if there's invites floating...

oooh! if there are any more of those spare invites running around...I've requested one from our overlords, but who knows how long that is going to take.

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

I don't trust Google enough to use gmail!

Just for a bit of variety on this thread: I'm not interested in an invitation.

I have a few invites (was at a tech conference this summer where I was erroneously identified as a future 'developer') - will happily invite the first few people who email me at henry*removethis*.farrell@gmail.com

I'm wondering whether developer invites might go through the system faster than "nominations" from hoi polloi (which is how my "invites" are presented). If that's the case, and Patrick and Teresa aren't yet on, one of you with developer invites might want to include them even though Eric and I already nominated them.

I'd love an invite, but I'm not in a position to make use of one. Maybe later.

Doesn't work like that, at least for me. I got a developer's account a couple of months ago, which is completely useless for anyone who is not actually a live real developer, or, at a pinch, at least has lots of friends with accounts among the developer's community. It gives you permissions to play with a separate sandbox - but not with the system that has been rolled out over the last week. You can play with experimental features, maybe an API soon if you are qualified to do this (I am not).I then got (as I assume everyone else with developer's accounts did) a standard account along with the other 100,000 people who were invited in the initial round. I don't think it is in any way different from other people's standard accounts - I have the same number of invites, and people who I have given them to don't seem to be getting them any quicker than anyone else. Perhaps there are some genuinely important people with uber-developers' accounts out there that do have more goodies attached (as noted - I only got mine through a fluke of being at the right place at the right time) - but I am not one of 'em.

I won't go into this at length, but I think some Google offerings are very intentionally targeted to seriously threaten Microsoft's market dominance in specific software areas, if only to keep Microsoft off balance and responding to them, and therefore in less of a position to threaten Google's bread-and-butter search+ads business. Lots of people in the Internet software area remember Netscape and the results of Microsoft's "cut off their air supply" strategy.

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.

I'm sure you've all heard of this site? Not sure it's trustworthy and that your email address won't be minable by spambots, but in this day and age we all know a way or two around that.

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

I am now all out of invites ... sorry to anyone who would like one...

Incidentally, I'm not sure I'd suggest people try to flock onto wave at the moment on chance invites. If you don't know many people on it, you'll probably try it out and get bored in minutes (think of facebook if you didn'thave any friends ... there's just not much to do). There are bots you can talk to and play around with, but ...

Patrick and Theresa:

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

It's worth noting that Patrick and Teresa are currently at Viable Paradise, and have limited internet time/bandwidth/mana. I don't know the status of their Wave invitations.

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

Re Abi@45:

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.)

abi: I thought it was the hypnotic waving of your silken locks.

Mark has an email from me already, but I threatened? promised? offered? a sonnet as well.

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.

Bravo abi!

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...

Awesome sonnet! Love this...

"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

Abi, that was absolutely *wonderful*!

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

Abi raises the bar to dizzying heights, Wave becomes truly awesome when all content is required to be in verse form.

IOW: Brava!

Adina @50:
I'm not too keen on heavy alliteration in a sonnet. I wanted a word that was both specific (kelp) and segued into the mountain forests of Sasquatch (echoing alpine).

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.

My invite took a full seven days to go through the system, so they've certainly slowed down the propagation. I'm now rillianbis@googlewave.com.

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.

My invite arrived last night! 6 days in the pipeline. Now all I need is some time to play with it...

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

Ralph Giles, your account ID is from the Google Account / GMail name space, so there is someone out there using your name in GoogleLand, even though I expect that you're the guy that comes up at the top* when I Google your name (it is amazing how few clicks it takes to get a positive ID on someone, it your case it was a tweet to Abi).

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.

My invite arrived last night. I'm evilrooster, since I already have the gmail account of the same name.

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

Ralph Giles @54: Nine days in my case; the invitation finally arrived early this morning. So far so good. I suspect the videos and tutorials will come in handy.
My ID is pendrift.

abi:

Collaborative poetry? Stories?

John Houghton @59:
Those would be fun too, but I was thinking of a way to work with the way I write and revise sonnets.

Finally, there is a viable reason to run Google Wave: roleplaying games. (via Allen Varney)

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

Earl @61:
It sounds like a great way to run an Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game campaign.

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!

abi (62): con game

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

signed, Momentarily Confused

Mary Aileen @63:
You mean a game at a convention, right? Not a confidence game?

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.

abi (64): Thanks for clearing that up. That's part of why I was confused, because the alternate (first) reading almost made sense.

abi @ 62: Innnnnteresting. Low power game, heavy on intrigue. I think it might be played on a few different waves actually, with factions and cabals keeping their planning separate from the main narrative - it could even be a fear and loathing style run, with waves only being merged when relevant and necessary.

Very interesting indeed.

It's a heavy world-building, low lead-characters-to-the-plot game. It was actually a pretty poor con game, because you really want deep planning rather than a single narrative line you can finish in a single gaming slot.

(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.

I really wish I'd saved the stuff I wrote from the GEnie SFRT Amber game I was in. Oz/Amber....

abi, I'd have thought Adron's Disaster had a lot more to do with Corwin's red riflemen. An attack on a possibly corrupt ruler already beset by corrosive pressures from below, the old ruler dying by a cause other than the rival's attack at a crucial moment, the source of the kingdom's power undermined at the climax by the actions of chaotic immortals...it roughly maps out.

I finally was accepted into Google Wave. It makes me feel all warm and Web Two Point Ohy.