Comment to win a Wave invitation

In the spirit of the comments for photography contest, I have another. I’ve been invited to participate in the invitation-only trial of Google Wave. I was given eight invitations, seven of which I have sent off to people I thought it might be useful to share Wave with. I will award the last one to a random person who leaves a comment on this site, during the next week. All eligible comments posted before 2:47pm Ottawa time on Tuesday October 20th will be entered into the random draw. The rules are the same as those for the previous contest.

Note that invitations aren’t processed instantly. As Google explains: “Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.”

Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.

46 thoughts on “Comment to win a Wave invitation”

  1. My first impression of my Wave account is that it is a lot like a fax machine: only useful if other people you know have one.

  2. Is Google cool with invites being used this way? I saw that some got pulled from being sold on eBay.

  4. Is Google cool with invites being used this way?

    Lots of blogs have people requesting and receiving Wave invites for commenting, so I am guessing Google is OK with it. After all, they want the invites to be going to people who are keen to try it out and who will provide good feedback.

    The flipside of network effects: the ongoing collapse of MySpace. I say good riddance. It was always the ugliest and most annoying blogging / social networking site.

  9. Should I want to win a Wave invite?

    It is a bit hard to know.

    GMail is email done better than anyone else has ever done it.

    Wave is something new. It will eventually get better than it is now. Maybe it will be amazing. Maybe it will fizzle.

    At the very least, not many people have accounts now, so it offers temporary geek cred.

  10. Three of the people I invited already got Wave accounts.

    Maybe they fast-track you if more than one person invites you.

  13. I actually already sent you one. For whatever reason, it didn’t process yet.

    Keep commenting, regardless!

  18. Google Wave has the potential to be a game changer. I have been dying to test it ever since I saw it being demoed at the Google IO conference.
    I would really appreciate an invite.

  19. It’s Just Fancy Talk
    The Google Wave chatting tool is too complicated for its own good.
    By Farhad Manjoo
    Posted Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2009, at 6:42 PM ET

    Here’s a little story to show just how thoroughly Google’s long-awaited chatting tool, called Google Wave, can kill your mood to chat: The other day, I was “waving” with Zach Frechette, the editor of GOOD magazine. Naturally, we were talking about the new site’s merits and flaws. As we went back and forth, I had a tiny epiphany. I wanted to tell Zach that I thought Wave would have a much tougher time catching on than Twitter, because it was asking so much more of its users. The trouble is, everything you type into Wave is transmitted live, in real time—every keystroke was getting sent to Zach just as I hit it. This made me too self-conscious to get my thoughts across.

    Like Wave, Twitter was also “trying to teach people a new way to communicate,” I wrote to Zach. “But its main”—and here I paused, searching my brain for the right word. I wanted to say that Twitter took off because it was drop-dead simple. So did I want to say, “but its main function was simplicity”? No, that was wrong. How about goal—”its main goal was simplicity”? Hmm, better, but still not quite right. The pause grew; the word that I wanted—in retrospect, feature—wasn’t coming to me, and I began to reconsider the sentence entirely. Maybe I should just delete what I’d written and say, “Twitter works because it’s simple.” But I couldn’t do that, because Zach was watching me. He could see me struggling right now—he could see that I’d gotten myself stuck in a textual cul-de-sac and that I was desperately searching for a way out without looking foolish. Now I saw Zach beginning to type: “Don’t let the live-typing get you down!” The game was up; what was the point of making a point now? I ended my thought clumsily and then resolved never to attempt to say anything very deep on Wave.

  20. So far, I am finding Wave pretty underwhelming.

    For one, it seems very buggy. Messages get marked ‘unread’ somewhat at random, and attachments of more than 500K never seem to upload.

    More importantly, it is not clear why Wave is more useful than GMail. The Slate article above is right to question whether this is a case of applying impressive web technologies to a less-than-impressive underlying idea.

  23. Apparently my husband will be green with envy if I get my hands on wave…so naturally I want to see that happen! Please enter me in your random draw.

  25. I want to wave, since I saw the demo at Googel I/O, so please enter me in random draw .
    Best Regards.

  30. It seems most appropriate to select a winner from among commenters who specifically expressed a desire for a Wave invite. As such, I have numbered off the comments that meet that criterion, excluding those of people who I already know have Wave accounts.

    R.K. – 1
    La Canadienne – 2
    epere4 – 3
    Pallab – 4
    Lynn – 5
    Joppi – 6
    Cometboy – 7
    Edward – 8

    Given the command to generate a random number between one and eight, Random.org yielded 5.

    Congratulations to Lynn. The invitation will be sent as soon as she clarifies which account she wants it sent to, though they sometimes take several days to process.

  31. Can you send me one invitation for Wave? I love google,and I love wave,and I want to try it.

  32. iam interested in the google wave,
    Please enter me in your random Draw.
    Regards
    Athidhi

  36. Google Wave to have its own app store

    We’re still not entirely certain what Google Wave is for — or even if humans are capable of comprehending it — but we do know that we’re super-intrigued by the idea of third-party extensions that hook into the fledging messaging platform, and it sounds like the folks in Mountain View are as well. Google’s planning to launch both an extension gallery and extension store in the coming months, which would allow users to easily find, buy, and share apps for Wave. It’s not clear how the sharing will work, or how much Google expects extensions to cost, but it’s certainly an interesting way to capitalize on Wave’s flexibility. Our first request? An extension to kill live-typing. Let’s make it happen.

  37. Google Wave as an RPG environment
    Ars Technica reports on the nascent Google Wave RPG scene, in which wavesters are amusing themselves by using Google’s collaboration tool s a surprisingly effective (for some games) means of keeping track of the action in game

  39. The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a comprehensive user manual by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash.

    Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that’s notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you’ll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that’s evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes.

  40. Google making Waves across all its Apps?

    We just received a set of screengrabs from an anonymous source giving us a glimpse at what appears to be Google’s (and thus, the world’s) future interface to its web applications, Gmail in particular. While we were originally tempted to ignore them, communications with the tipster would indicate genuine insider knowledge. Regardless, we can not independently confirm the authenticity of these images. Having said that, the pics demonstrate a more unified apps interface based on Google’s Wave and accessible from any browser (as they are now). Specifically, we’re told that “the goal is to provide a consistent experience throughout all Google Apps and blur the line between the browser and the website (e.g. drag and drop, right-click, etc.).” Something that certainly makes sense to us based on what we know about Google’s tender approach to its Chrome browser and its future “lightweight” Chrome OS. If true then this “work in progress” also hints at the importance of Wave to the future of Google. Then again, it could be just one of many possible interface concepts from Google’s burgeoning developer’s sandbox.

  41. Google Wave opens doors to public, asks old friends for new chance
    By Ross Miller

    To think, it was about this time last year that Google first unveiled its collaboration tool Wave, and today the company’s taking out the invitational step and opening it to the public at large — which begs the question, did anyone not have an invite that wanted one at this point? It’ll also be now available in the enterprise-centric Apps suite for no extra charge. On the developer side of things, expect some more open source code be unleashed, including most importantly the rich text editor. Can’t say we’ve really dug around in the service ourselves since its beta launched, but co-creator Lars Rasmussen tells us we should be giving it another go. He further acknowledged that they’ve got some work to do on educating users on the best ways to use the service, which at this point seems to be mid- and small-scale collaboration. To that end, expect some new tutorial videos, and with any luck, some amusing animation.

  42. R.I.P. Google Wave

    Yesterday, Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President of Google, released a statement acknowledging the lack of plans to keep on developing Wave, a real time collaboration tool released a little more than a year ago. Hölzle mentions a lack of “user adoption”.

    Wave’s dismissal is saddening because it was one of the most innovative and useful tool Google had released in a while. Yes, you’ve guessed it, we use Wave all the time here at TechHaze, be it to review articles pending for publication, to discuss internal matters or to simply fool around with other editors during our free time. For instance, Martin Schweiger’s interview was entirely conducted on Wave.

  43. Wave Goodbye
    A tech autopsy of Google’s failed communication platform.
    By Farhad Manjoo

    In a short blog post on Aug. 4, Google announced that it was pulling the plug on Wave, the “real-time communication and collaboration” Web site that the company launched last year. This wasn’t a surprise. “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” Google explained diplomatically—something akin to describing the Hindenburg’s last voyage as being a tad bumpy. In reality, Wave had been deserted for months. Although it won a standing ovation when the company first unveiled the program last year, many early users reacted as I did when Wave went live—I was instantly turned off by its complexity and by the way it confounded online social conventions. (Especially annoying was its always-on “live typing,” which revealed your textual fumbles to the world. Thanks, Google!)

    The biggest problem with Wave, though, was that nobody seemed to know why it existed. What kind of users would benefit from Wave? Which online tool was it designed to replace? After poking into Wave semi-frequently during its early months, I never found a compelling reason to go back. I wasn’t alone.

    Google has downplayed Wave’s demise, suggesting that such mistakes are a necessary part of the company’s experimental culture. “Remember, we celebrate our failures,” CEO Eric Schmidt told reporters earlier this month. “This is a company where it’s absolutely OK to try something that’s very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that and apply it to something different.”

    I agree with Schmidt that Google’s penchant for experimentation is laudable and one of the reasons for its longstanding success. But what’s the point of releasing an experiment into the wild when you’ve given it no chance to succeed? A Google rep, who told me I could characterize our conversation but not quote it, indicated that the company always thought of Wave as more of a concept than a product. Google is bullish about the Web—since it makes most of its money from the Web, it has a corporate interest in making sure that the Web browser remains a place for technical innovation. Wave, which was one of the most technically sophisticated Web applications ever built, was meant to show off what’s feasible in a browser—in particular, that a Web app could be every bit as a responsive and functional as something running on your desktop or mobile phone.

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  45. Google announced today on its official blog the impending closure of a number of its less successful services. In addition to retiring minor features like Bookmarks List and Friend Connect, Google has outlined a plan to close down Wave. The experimental communication medium will go read-only on January 31, and on April 30 they will shut it down completely. Also on April 30, Google will be changing Knol so that individual knols are not viewable, though users will still be able to download and export them until October 1, at which point they’ll disappear entirely. Google Gears is also getting the axe, as is Search Timeline and the Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative.

  46. “Google Wave—We announced that we’d stopped development on Google Wave over a year ago. But as of January 31, 2012, Wave will become read-only and you won’t be able to create new ones. On April 30 we will turn it off completely. You’ll be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. If you’d like to continue using this technology, there are a number of open-source projects, including Apache Wave and Walkaround.”

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