Google Invites Users to Test Wave
Google today announced that it will be sending out thousands more Google Wave invitations to users eager to preview the service.
Google has said that it will send out more than 100,000 invites to developers who have been active in the developer preview the company started up back in June. Selected Google Apps customers will also receive invites and users who signed up and offered to provide feedback wave.google.com will receive invites for friends and family.
Announced last May, Google Wave is a sort of a huge, social-networking message board that combines an Internet browser, instant messaging, wikis, photo sharing, and e-mail:
“You create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly,” explains Wave developer Lars Rasmussen. “It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication,” he continued. “You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.”
In this morning's blog post, Rasmussen did say there were still some key features missing from Wave that the company has yet to implement. At the moment you can't remove a friend from a wave, define groups of users or configure the permissions of users on wave. Rasmussen said that they'd be rolling out those features, along with a draft mode and more, over the next few months.
How many of you use Google Wave? Let us know what you think of the service below.
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Jane McEntegart is a writer, editor, and marketing communications professional with 17 years of experience in the technology industry. She has written about a wide range of technology topics, including smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. Her articles have been published in Tom's Guide, Tom's Hardware, MobileSyrup, and Edge Up.
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SAL-e digiexWhat happened to Orkut? Another google flap comming...There is only one way never to fail. It is never to try something new. At the same time they never will succeed if they never try something new.Reply -
doomtomb this actually sounds pretty good to me. An easy way to consolidate all the social networking services that are popping up everywhere. That's what I look forward to, organized and less hectic.Reply -
SAL-e ssalimAnother facebook+twitter?ProDigit80What's google wave? Another social network?Currently is demoed as social network, but the real thing is the set of protocols used behind the service. It is position as converge technology between e-mail, IE, HTTP, FTP, web apps like Google Docs, wiki and etc. If this thing takes off the Internet will be different tomorrow. There are concerns that "Federation" protocol used is very complex and requires real paradigm shift. Also requires the web browsers to support the latest Internet standards. Big problem with current state of IE and Microsoft.Reply -
lifelesspoet An interesting note, it will be requiring users of IE 6/7/8 to install the google chrome frame plugin to limit internal development time. Hard to say how this will affect corporate adoption of the collaboration tool.Reply -
Major7up ssalimAnother facebook+twitter?That goes well with my mantra 'the best opportunities are the ones we make for ourselves' but additionally, we can learn as much from failure as we can from success.Reply