Tech Blog

[#1]

Yesterday a lucky few (100,000 people) were invited to Google Wave an innovation that has been described as game-changing and "email if it were invented today". The first public disbursement of invitations to Google Wave has been greatly anticipated among the geek set. Brad Grier and I were part of the lucky few to get early invites and we invited Laura, Buzz, Graham, and Klaus (thus far only Buzz has received his invite because Google is trickling out the "second wave" of invites).

Brad got on this morning, I started last night and early this morning, and the consensus among the digerati that we hang with is "wow, just wow". Here is what our budding Future Shop Blogger conversation is looking like right now:

I know it doesn't look like much, but trust me here, when you use it, when you see people typing in real time, adding pictures, posting to Twitter and Blogger simultaneously you'll sit back with your jaw slack.

Don't believe me? Fine, watch this less than 8 minute video:


Now what do you think? Yeah, that's more like it. Live translation of conversations? Live commenting on blogs and Wave at the same time!
Yes, this is still a product very, very (did I mention very?) early in its development. Bugs? Yeah break out the can of Raid, cause there are bugs a plenty. This doesn't matter. It really doesn't. We're seeing something new. Really new. What will it look like in a year? Cooler I'm sure and probably different, but I feel lucky to be here early and be able to help Google construct this new tool.

The plan is that when more of us Future Shop Bloggers have received our invites, we'll do a little screencast (maybe with audio narration!) showing what we like the most about Google Wave.

Finally, no, I don't have any more invites left. Yes, each person who got in early received 8 invites. All of mine are gone and Google is tight lipped about when more will be made available.

Message Edited by trishussey on 10-01-2009 11:50 PM

[#2]

Wave is cool no doubt, but let's not get too ahead of ourselves. Real time chat? ICQ had that ages ago. Collaborative conversations? IRC and MindAlign (now OCS) had that. Wave is simply an evolution of those concepts.

[#3]

>>Wave is simply an evolution of those concepts.

Maybe so. But sometimes a product becomes more than the sum of its parts. Besides, if it was that simple, why haven't we seen this years ago? (Brr.. I dread to think of what wave would look like, if it had been developed by Microsoft!)

I'm not ashamed to to admit that I wet my pants, when I first saw the tech-demo video, some time back (Okay, maybe a little..). I have no idea how many times I've seen that thing, and I can't wait to get my hands on this! 

[#4]

@MrDisco: You're right about real-time chat. In fact you're right about evolution...Wave is an evolution of everything that we've been building online for the last 40 years. The thing that I'm most excited about is the potential here.

Yes, some of my friends in the digerati set are yawning at Wave. And right now Wave is a black hole of time, but that is because it's so early on, that we're just looking around and trying things. The conversations I've been having with people within Wave and the community testing that we're doing (there is a whole Wave on just browser testing), shows me that great things are coming.