Google wave invites

This post has been rewritten & republished on Associated Content where I thought someone might actually read it!

Invited to google wave

Okay, so yesterday, bleary eyed and clutching a mug of coffee I opened my email to find a bright shiny new google wave invite. Unless you have been dwelling under a lump or mass of hard consolidated mineral matter for the past few months, you will probably know that google wave is the new product from google promising solve the many glaring omissions exist in the much loved, often maligned and frequently cursed method of communication known as email.

Actually wave is designed to do much more than that. While browser based communication technology has jumped ahead leaps and bounds over the last few years with Googles own gmail pushing the boundary of what email could be, Facebook making it entirely unnecessary to see anyone you know ever again and Myspace giving you the ability to make people gouge out their eyes at nearly any distance while accompanied by a catchy pop song, all of these platforms are lacking. Namely collaboration. Google wave promised to blur the boundary between communication and document, in fact Google makes the claim that google wave is equal parts conversation and document. Which in actual fact is not something that anyone has ever seen before outside excitedly scrabbling down notes on the back of beer mats in drunken bouts of creative passion.

So, I have watched the videos, read the articles, worked myself up to such a fever pitch of excitement that some people would question my sexual motives and then from out of the ether it arrives. A google wave invite. The last time I got this excited was when I got my google voice invite, only be crushingly disappointed on finding it was unavailable in the UK.

With palms sweating and fingers twitching I clicked the link, my breath exhaling slowly as the moment seemed to expand out into infinity. The page loaded and behold! I wasn't really sure what I was looking at.

I know this is unfair but I think that after the hype surrounding this launch I was expecting some sort of religious experience, and as usual I wasn't getting one. I am not criticising wave by any means. It's just that there is a problem, and that problem is I haven't got anyone to wave to. Imagine Facebook as one lonely page with just your lonely self writing status updates telling yourself what a great guy you are, not completely dissimilar to my blog in fact.

This is actually a serious point. The thing that will make or break this thing is people. When computers were first networked someone had the bright idea of being able to link pages together by joining the words between two documents. They called this hypertext and it was initially seen as a way to write non sequentially quite a while earlier than the computer, but the concept really came alive when networked machines become commonplace. It didn't seem obvious at the time but give a 1.6 billion people the ability to write non-sequentially and link each others work together then you find some pretty interesting emergent behaviour occurs. In fact the global network occurs.

Now update that a little. What google wave essentially offers is the ability to edit those documents in real time and use them as a form of conversation. Rather than a static pages being linked together, emails bouncing back and forth or even instant messages being sent in real time all of this comes together in one document. Combined with the playback facility that lets new participants to a wave being constructed by reviewing its history you are starting to see some pretty powerful properties of an essentially simple format.


Okay so back to my problem. I have nobody to wave to. I have twenty invitations to give out and I am willing to offer them to anyone who is will to help me test out what this new platform can do. Read that clearly, I am not just wanting to give them out to anyone so they can sit on them. I wan't to actually use this system and see what happens when you get a group of people communcating over it. If you're interested then leave a comment with your email address. Remember to obfuscate them a little otherwise you will likely get spidered and spammed. http://scr.im/ is a pretty good service for this. It's kind of like tiny url but for email addresses. If you're not interested yourself but know someone who would like to know where to get a google wave invite then feel free to point them in this direction

If I can get some people to try this out with me, and we notice some behavour in use that wouldn't neccessarly be apparent by poking around at the options then I might write a couple more posts on it. I think it would be really interesting to have a group of technology enthusiasts using wave to discuss wave.