Google Wave first Invitees

Google Wave is about to open to new users. Starting today, Google will send 100,000 invites to some of those who were eager to use an early version of the service. Google's blog lists three categories of users that will receive invites: Google Wave Sandbox users, those who signed up and offered to give feedback on Google Wave and some Google Apps users. When you receive an invitation to Google Wave, you'll be able to invite other people so you can use Google Wave together.

"Google received more than 1 million requests to participate in the preview, said Lars Rasmussen, engineering manager for Google Wave, and while it won't be able to accommodate all those requests on Wednesday it is at least ready to begin the next phase of the project," writes CNet.

Like Gmail's early version released in April 2004, Google Wave lacks many basic features: you can't remove someone from a wave, you can't configure permissions or write drafts. The interface is not very polished and some of the options are difficult to find, but it's important to keep in mind that Google Wave is just one of the ways to implement an open protocol. Gmail revolutionized email with an interface inspired by discussion boards: messages are grouped in conversations and it's easy to handle a large amount of messages. Google Wave wants to revolutionize real-time communication by extending a protocol mostly used for instant messaging, XMPP.

Combining email, instant messaging and wikis seems like a recipe for confusion, but Google Wave pioneers a new generation of web applications, where everything is instantaneous. As Google explains, each wave is a hosted conversation and users can edit the conversation in real-time.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/new-batch-of-google-wave-invites.html

Google wants to know a Google Docs Redesign is coming(I wonder why)

On the Google Docs blog today, the company took the time to make a non-announcement. Basically, there’s a bunch of words that bury the real story: That Google Docs will soon be launching a “brand new shiny interface.”

Hmmm. I wonder why. Obviously, earlier this week Microsoft laid out its plans for Office 2010, which includes a web-based component meant to take on Google Docs. But once again, there is nothing to actually see right now from Google, instead this is a pre-announcement to let users know that they may be seeing wonky elements over the next few weeks as they tweak things on the fly.

Not surprisingly, the sharing of documents will be a key element to this redesign. Despite it being perhaps the key element of Google Docs, sharing items with others is simply not that intuitive right now. Here’s what Google has in mind for the future:

One thing you’ll probably notice in the next few days is that the “Shared with…” list in the left hand pane will go away. But don’t worry, you can still use Search to do the same thing. Just click on “Search Options” and type the user’s name into the “Shared with:” box. If this is a search you’ll do over and over again, you can click “Save this search” so it will be easily accessible in “Saved Searches”.

Another thing you’ll see is the new Sharing Menu. We feel this is a big improvement over the old one; we’ve moved all the sharing functionality into this one dialog, so now you can completely manage sharing without having to leave the Docs list.

Other than that, Google is adding a bunch of new search operators (which only the hardcore users will care about). And it concludes the post with “They [the new features] will be followed shortly by the new interface and a number of pretty exciting features we have in the pipe.”
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/google-wants-you-to-know-a-google-docs-redesign-is-coming-i-wonder-why/

Google wave is a killer application watch out

A new service which–well, it’s one of the most ambitious services that Google or anyone else has cooked up? How ambitious? Project leader Lars Rasmussen says that it began with the question “What might e-mail look like if it were invented today?” ... It:

Is a service that looks like a rich piece of client software;

Behaves like sophisticated threaded e-mail;

Acts like IM when multiple collaborators are online at once.

Is one of the most real-time collaborative tools I’ve ever seen.

Has revision marking and versioning for workgroup editing.

Has instant photo sharing.

Allows its functionality to be embedded into blogs and social networks;

Can serve as a container for OpenSocial applications;

Has what Google says is a revolutionary spell checker;

Comes in mobile flavors for Android and iPhone;

Is an open-source project that lets developers write both Wave extensions ... and their own servers.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/google_wave_who_what_where_why_when