Finally got my invite; who else has an account and wants to mess around with me on it?

MOTHER****ER. I totally want an invite, I sent off for one ages ago.

WANT

what's it do again?

I want one

Ja, was ist?

as far as i can tell it's just a collaboration tool

thats awesome dude, I wish I had an account for that. I'd kill to have that plus enough invites to bring on schoolmates

I sent out my request weeks ago. Still no joy.

(I even told them a joke on my invite!)

I would, but I don't have an account.

The sad thing is that I can't even do anything with it right now, because I don't know anyone else who has an account. I only got invited by begging some dude on an IRC channel. That's why I was sort of hoping someone here had gotten an invite so we could try it out together.

http://kyle90.info/images/_snapshots/wave.PNG

Does that count as a rickroll?

Watch this loooong video
http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html#video

It's a real-time communication tool. It's more like a real-time wiki than anything else. The invites are to the developer demo, so it may well be a little buggy and not work like the final 'product'. Google has never really done this before, even the GMail 'beta' was essentially the same GMail we use today, and this is exciting because Wave is not just a web product, it's an entirely new and open protocol. I have no idea how they've done this, but they have (seemingly) character-by-character real-time communication. They've released these invites so developers can try to make their own stuff using Wave. Some sort of Twitter wave would be cool.

The current stuff you see in that video looks a lot like e-mail, which I think is a problem because it isn't really e-mail and doesn't work like it. And also, your Wave account is entirely open, so anyone that has your Wave address can send you waves and start talking to you. I think that should probably change, with some sort of privacy settings with Facebook-style friend requests. This is a really ambitious project, and it may well fail because it seems to have a pretty steep learning curve from what I've heard, but if it takes off it could be very exciting.

It's e-mail 2.0.

No! No it isn't! That's the big misunderstanding, and Google itself has done a pretty poor job of addressing this confusion. It's collaborate editing, for group projects or reports. Though it does seem fairly confusing. This is pretty funny:

http://easiertounderstandthanwave.com/

You could use it LIKE e-mail, in theory. It can work the same way... you post a message, the other guy logs on later and sees it and posts a reply.

Or it can work like IM, if both of you are on at once.

Isn't it pretty much like a forum?

I would use email if it were more like a forum.

I would use IM if it were more like a forum, too. Plus amazon.com

That too. Kind of like a mashup of all three. Forum, IM, e-mail.

I could see it being pretty useful in an office environment